Facebook blocks Yandex social search app

Tue 26 February 2013 15:30, Tamara Yadvichuk

Here is a quick update for those following the news of the Russian online world. A couple of weeks ago Russian search giant Yandex launched a social search app called Wonder aimed at iPhone and iPod Touch users in the United States. And almost immediately, the app was blocked by Facebook, its main data provider!

Wonder app was meant to help users search for music, places and news based on the info of their friends on social networks, and relied on the data pulled from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, iTunes and Last.fm. Here you can see the app’s promotional video showing how it works (or, so to say, how it would have worked if Facebook didn’t deny it the access to its Graph API).

Wonder app was presumably denied the access to Facebook data on the grounds of the app providing a service which competes with Facebook’s own features. The app’s developers, on the other hand, claim that Wonder was not violating any of Facebook’s Platform Policies.

However, since the social search app largely depended on Facebook in its functionality, its developers at Yandex Labs decided to ‘put it on hold’, meaning that it will no longer be available on iTunes. For those who have already downloaded it, the app will continue working, but, of course, without the access to their Facebook friends’ information.

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