You might have noticed a sudden influx of Google+ invites in your Facebook News Feed in the past 24 hours. That’s because everyone seems to be testing an assertion made by a couple of Google executives Tuesday morning that Facebook is blocking Google+ invites in the feed, (as you’ll see in the YouTube video below.)
The brouhaha began Tuesday morning. Bradley Horowitz and Vic Gundotra, two Google executives who work on Google+, posted a YouTube video that showed someone trying to share their Google+ invite in a Facebook status update, but failing to do because the friend’s account failed to reflect that update.
“We are getting reports of Google+ invite links not showing up on Facebook news feeds anymore (they appear to have stopped on Friday). I wonder how widespread this problem is?” asked Gundotra in a Monday morning post on his Google+ account.
If the weird glitch ends up being determined as a deliberate move then that could potentially be an antitrust problem, or even just a problem someone could take to the Federal Trade Commission charging that Facebook is acting deceptively. Facebook has 750 million account holders against Google’s estimated 18 million.
But the executives’ posts met with mixed reactions. Some people said they weren’t having a problem, and others said that their Google+ invites weren’t showing up in their friends’ news feeds either. It seemed totally random.
Nevertheless, the video went viral. Posted Tuesday, it’s been viewed more than 43,000 times, and was spread around via e-mail.
Asked about the issue, a Facebook spokesman issued the following statement.
“We have seen the video but have been unable to replicate the experience it shows.”
He added:
Newsfeed is an automated system that is designed to deliver the most relevant content to you and your friends.
The technology evaluates hundreds of factors, including your relationship to the poster, the type of content, the click-through rate (where appropriate), and people hiding similar posts from their feed.
In real time, it decides what to display to you and what to filter for both Top News and Most Recent.
It also includes systems that attempt to identify and block spam.
Links have a history of the most abuse and are given the most scrutiny. As a result of all of these factors, a given link may be shown or filtered to people differently at different times.
Hmmm, so maybe you won’t be seeing an influx of those Google+ invite links after all — if everyone’s doing it at the same time, could it be considered spam?
A few hours later, Horowitz backed down, saying: “I’m hearing reports that this has started working for folks… Glad to hear it, and thanks for your feedback.”
Horowitz might presumably also have been glad that the flap rather perked up interest in Google’s product.
