How Facebook Made My Phone Less Useful

Last year, at upgrade time on my Verizon Wireless account, I bought the HTC ERIS Android phone (full disclosure: uses the Google Android OS, and this blog is on Blogger, a Google site). Neat little handheld computer. Problem is it’s not a great phone. Don’t get me started.

Even so, as I used one of its features to indicate my favorite connections from my contact list, it populated a widget with the names and photos of these people. On each one I could assign a default action. Plus, by providing my Facebook identity for another Android feature, the widget would search my Facebook friends and, if one of my favorites was there, would retreive their profile picture from the Facebook page. Sw-ee-t!

About two months ago, HTC put out an upgrade for the Android system, going from OS 1.x to 2.1. Among the many changes it implemented was the erasure of all the favorites in the widget. As I patiently revisited each connection, I noticed that the Facebook pix were not appearing. I reset my account data. Still no pix. In fact, many of the Facebook-accessing features had been eliminated. Curious, but I erroneously blamed the HTC Android update.

Then, last week, I read on Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim about Facebook blocking a recent Twitter tool. The item details a lawsuit that reveals Facebook’s assertion that its terms of service have the force of law by defining data access to individual accounts by third-party applications.

This is not the place to argue the relative merits of Facebook’s terms, that’s being done many other places, including at the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (I touched on it over a year ago here.) However, this much is clear to me: Facebook has made my phone less useful by blocking the software program I was using to link to information about my closest connections.

From the marketing perspective, this seems counter-intuitive. It’s pretty obvious that much of the value of the internet and wireless networks over the last decade has been in driving out obstacles to the sharing of information. In fact, it can be argued that the fluidity of the information system is one of the prevailing forces behind greater business and personal productivity, which has been a significant and positive economic influence during the past two years of recession.

Now comes Facebook, with global domination aspirations (see Peter Shankman’s comment below), damming up the information flow as a business model. Could be that they intend to introduce their own Android app and want to protect that market space. However, because the gates are closing even to worldwide networks like Twitter, there is little doubt to Facebook’s ultimate intention to own and control every bit of your life and social behavior inside its electronic walls. Beware of the illusion of transparency that Facebook attempts to hold out as a benefit. They’re rapidly displaying the type of tyranny that steals your identity and sells it off to the highest bidders.