Wonder No More: Yandex Says Facebook Has Given A Final No On Graph API Usage, Will Pull Its Social App

Some closure on the story of how Yandex — the Russian search giant — built a social discovery app that relied on Facebook interconnection to gather data, and then found Facebook blocking its service within hours of launching. Today Yandex said that after discussions with the social network, Facebook has finally, terminally said that the app violates its Platform Policies, and so it will not reinstate the ability to use Facebook’s Graph API. As a result, Yandex is planning to pulll the app from the app store and put it on hold for now.

The full statement from Yandex:

“We discussed the issue with Facebook and it was confirmed that Facebook views the application Wonder as something that violates the Facebook Platform Policies (section I.12) and that the access to Facebook’s Graph API will not be restored.

“According to Section I.12, no data obtained from Facebook can be used in any search engine or directory without the company’s written permission. The reason behind Facebook’s decision to revoke our access to their data appears to be that they do consider Wonder to be a search engine, while our understanding of what it is differs from this view.

“Wonder’s functioning, in its current state, as well as the quality of user experience it provides, largely depends on the access to Facebook’s Graph API. Since this access was revoked, we decided to put our application on hold for the time being. We will be considering partnership opportunities with other social networks and services to offer our users a richer internet experience via Wonder.”

The emergence of Wonder, and a week before the blockage of Voxer, has kicked off a new level of scrutiny about how Facebook allows other apps to appropriate its data: in effect, the company has said that it is not sharing with apps that don’t share back.

More to come.

via TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/30/wonder-no-more-yandex-says-facebook-has-given-a-final-no-on-graph-api-usage-will-pull-its-social-app/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29