Russia’s search giant Yandex has decided to withdraw Wonder, its new voice-activated search application for social networks, from Apple’s App Store, following Facebook’s decision to block it, rendering the app largely irrelevant.
Launched just six days ago, Wonder retrieves and displays relevant data from Facebook or other social network content. As The Next Web noted, this is exactly how a mobile implementation of Facebook’s Graph Search, which is currently only compatible with desktop browsers, might work.
“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,” the Russian company stated yesterday.
“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 Since this access was revoked, we decided to put our application on hold for the time being.”
However, “we will be considering partnership opportunities with other social networks and services to offer users a richer internet experience via Wonder,” concludes Yandex.
The blockage of Wonder, following that of Voxer a week before, has kicked off a new level of scrutiny about how Facebook allows third-party apps to access its data, notes Ingrid Lunden of Techcrunch in an insightful article. The social network has said that it is not sharing with apps that don’t share back, or that replicate core functionality without permission.
