in response to johntynan's question: "Could it be that a contact list in email implies some degree of privacy, but a list of friends on a social networking site implies an implicit understanding of openness?"
It seems like OpenSocial indeed says that "friends" on all social websites are fair game but Google's own "contacts" are not. To be honest I really don't think that there should be a distinction. If one is open, the other should be by logical extension, since the information risks are the same. The flipside to this argument however, is that you are generally open about whom you call a "friend" and you'll share that information with everyone. Contacts aren't necessarily the same. For example, someone might not want all their contacts to know that they regularly e-mail a therapist, or let their boss know that they have an addiction to buying anime. I think a happy medium would be to make an API that only gives "contact" info for the person that's logged in. That way, we developers can make programs that see their contacts -- but NOT see their contacts' contacts. To do that there would need to be the caveat that developers MUST NOT save contact-info for future use (a site/gadget/whatever that saves this info could eventually assemble a complete social-map, which is what we're trying to avoid). Things get difficult, which must be why Google makes those deals. Does anyone know a way around this? --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Data API" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-help-dataapi?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
