The extension is essentially a way to expose the shortcomings of Google search results, now that the results include social sharing input from Google’s own social network (loosely speaking), Google+. It is an interesting thought experiment, though it is hard for me to ignore the fact that it comes from Facebook. Oh, did I mention Ross is Facebook’s Director of Product? As John Battelle points out

I mean, it’s one thing for a lone hacktivist to do this, it’s quite another for a member of the Internet Big Five to publicly call Google out. Facebook would need to vet this with legal, with management (this clearly had to pass muster with Mark Zuckerberg), and, I was told, Facebook wanted to reach out to others – such as Twitter – and get their input as well.

The pot calling the kettle black

Sure, today the extension is being pitched as a piece of software that was collectively cobbled together by engineers from Twitter, MySpace and Facebook. (Twitter says two people worked on the software, though it wouldn’t say for how long, or how much of the final code was their contribution.) Of course, as Battelle points out, the extension was originally a Facebook/Blake Ross production. It now has a new home on the web: Focus On The User.

That is rich, considering Facebook’s record on serving the interests — and protecting the privacy — of its users has more twists and turns than a tapeworm. When it comes to privacy and putting users first, Facebook, depending on how you look at it, is either morally ambiguous or just plain shallow.

Once upon a time, “don’t be evil” meant something

There was a time, back in its early days, Google sure was a true  believer  in its “don’t be evil” motto. Not any more. Google, too, speaks from both sides of its mouth. Any search engine that runs advertisements from clinics promoting pre-natal gender tests is the personification of wrongdoing. And that is but one example.

Either way, what I am saying is that “don’t be evil” is not a product or a slogan or a tagline to recruit employees. From the way I see it, it has to be a belief system for a company. It is a defining attribute of the company and its larger mission. It is a moral lens through which a company makes its decisions. It is about doing the right thing for the end customers.

I think somewhere down the line, Google forgot that its customers are us, the people and decided that advertisers were its customers. Otherwise, why else would it force the Google+ search results on web searchers. Dave Winer put it best when he wrote:

I really don’t like the way Google search is going. It’s becoming more and more laden with strategy taxes. It’s being designed more and more for their competitors, rather than for their users (us) or their customers (the advertisers).

Just like Google, Facebook cannot brandish “don’t be evil” lightly. Instead of putting us the people first, Facebook makes no bones about using all our data, sacrificing our privacy, in an effort to create a system to sell us advertising. So when they name an extension “Don’t Be Evil,” I am sorry, but I do get riled up.

Doing the right thing and finding a business model and obeying Wall Street’s motto of “always be growing” is a balancing act that is hard. It needs corporate leaders who indeed are believers — and so far, despite the lip service, both Facebook and Google have failed that test.

My colleague Mathew Ingram puts it best when he writes:

The reality of this ongoing battle is that both sides have shown they are more than happy to criticize others for being closed or proprietary or otherwise unfair, at the same time as they themselves favor their own content or services, lock up their data or otherwise use their market position to strong-arm their competitors. “Don’t be evil” is a knife that cuts in multiple directions, and both Google and Facebook need to be careful about how — and where — they wave it around.

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When Google launched its new social search features earlier this month, with results from Google+ prominently displayed, Twitter was quick to criticize the company for giving its own network preferential treatment, but there was no response from Facebook. Now, the giant social network is making itself heard in a different way: director of product Blake Ross and a small team have launched a browser plugin called “Don’t be evil” they claim presents Google’s search more fairly, and they are publicizing it through a site called “Focus on the user.” It seems the battle is on to prove who is more open — but is this a war that Facebook can win, or just a chance to score some cheap PR points against Google?

Google calls its new feature “Search plus Your World,” but as we and others noted at the time of its launch, the results that show up for most users (the service is enabled by default) consist primarily of Google+ content, including status updates, photos and profile pages. Even when a user isn’t logged in to Google, the promotional section of the search page shows Google+ recommendations — and when a user is logged in, results appear to favor pages from Google’s network, even when someone uses a term that implies they are looking for a Twitter profile.

Google says it doesn’t favor its own results, but is that true?

Google chairman Eric Schmidt has said the company doesn’t favor its own social network in results, and it would be more than happy to display results from Twitter and Facebook, but hasn’t been able to get proper access to their data (a deal with Twitter expired late last year and wasn’t renewed). But Sullivan noted Google’s results are full of information from Twitter that has come through a standard web-crawl, and Google seems to be deliberately not showing them as prominently.

This is the central point Blake Ross and his team of programmers — some of whom work for Myspace and Twitter — say they are trying to make with their plugin. As Ross explained to John Battelle of Federated Media, the browser “bookmarklet” allows a user to rearrange their search results to show what Facebook says is a more objective view of the web, instead of one that favors Google+ content. But the plugin doesn’t just remove Google+ results: instead, Ross says it simply uses the company’s own search algorithm to provide results from multiple networks (such as Twitter and Facebook) by looking at how that content is ranked without the “Search plus Your World” setting enabled:

So that’s what our “bookmarklet” does. It looks at the three places where Google only shows Google+ results and then automatically googles Google to see if Google finds a result more relevant than Google+.

The three places the site is referring to are the search results themselves, the promotional box on the right-hand side often reserved for ads, and the “suggested search” or auto-complete text that comes up when you start typing in the search field. As described in a FAQ at the “Focus on the User” site and in a video demonstration (which is embedded below), the plugin combines a regular unfiltered Google search with some of the search engine’s other features — such as “rich web snippets,” which take images and excerpts from web pages — to present results from multiple networks.

Facebook is playing a dangerous game

If an unknown programmer had released this plugin, it might have seemed like just a good-natured thumb in the eye for Google and its social-search ambitions, but because Ross is the director of product at Facebook (and a former lead developer at Mozilla) — and his team went to the trouble of registering a domain, recording a demo video, etc. for their plugin — makes it clear this is a shot across Google’s bow from a major competitor. But will it accomplish what Facebook hopes it will accomplish?

Most users will probably never install the “Don’t be evil” plugin or bookmarklet, and many may not even see why Google’s new social results are a bad thing. Some Google supporters have argued that the company should be able to promote whatever it wants in its results, and that if users don’t like it they can switch to using Microsoft’s Bing or some other search engine. So why is Facebook bothering? Among other things, the social network is probably hoping to ratchet up the attention federal antitrust regulators are paying to Google’s behavior, since its favoritism of its own services has already become an issue with the Federal Trade Commission.

This skirmish feels a lot like a replay of the last time Google and Facebook locked horns, when Google changed the terms of its API to prevent Facebook users from importing their Gmail contacts automatically, since Facebook didn’t allow users of other services to download their Facebook contact info. At one point, Google even renamed its contact-exporting feature “Trap My Contacts Now” as a way of highlighting what it said was Facebook’s lack of openness. (Facebook later changed its settings so that users can download the email addresses of their social graph, but only if each user gives their permission.)

The reality of this ongoing battle is that both sides have shown they are more than happy to criticize others for being closed or proprietary or otherwise unfair, at the same time they themselves favor their own content or services, lock up their data or otherwise use their market position to strong-arm their competitors. “Don’t be evil” is a knife that cuts in multiple directions, and both Google and Facebook need to be careful about how — and where — they wave it around.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Fabio Venni

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Today was my last day at Facebook. Normally when I leave a job I go out cursing the management and wishing I had left much sooner. In the case of Facebook, I sent heartfelt emails to all of my managers thanking them for the privilege of letting me work there, and I genuinely meant it. Facebook was the longest I ever worked at one company, and the best employer I’ve ever had.

Working at Facebook was like having my own startup, but with a paycheck instead of ramen. Management gave me the freedom to work on my own ideas, and just like with real startups, some of my projects never made it out of the lab, while others shipped and were huge successes. The brilliance of Facebook management is encouraging everyone to take initiative, take risks, and wear as many hats as you can. I wish more tech companies operated like this.

Having known Hewitt for a while, I can safely say that he means every single word. Not one to give lip service, Hewitt is a straight shooter. He joined Facebook after Mark Zuckerberg & Co acquired Parakey, a company Hewitt co-founded with Blake Ross about four years ago. Hewitt’s contributions to the mobile ecosystem, including his work on Facebook for iPhone, was the main reason we included him the inaugural GigaOM Mobile Influencers list. Here is what we wrote about him:

In the world of software, there are few who qualify for rock star status. But Joe Hewitt, a New Jersey-born programmer, is one of them. He started out at Netscape in 2000, working on the browser’s user interface, after which he went on to help longtime cohort Blake Ross reinvent the Netscape browser as Mozilla’s Firefox. In 2006 he left Mozilla to work with Ross on a new startup, Parakey, that in turn was acquired by Facebook in 2007.

Then when Apple launched the iPhone, Hewitt released iUI, a user interface library that consisted of a combination of javascript and CSS, and allowed for the easy development of web applications that matched the device’s native visual elements. Later he wrote an iPhone-specific version of Facebook, which has helped to both take the social network to the top of the mobile heap and jumpstarted the adoption of social networking services on all major mobile phone platforms. What’s even more surprising: Hewitt is the one-man programming machine behind Facebook for the iPhone.

After spending his energies on the iPhone, he moved away from Apple’s platform and turned his attention to the Android platform. Today Facebook is a mobile monster, possibly working on its own mobile platform. Hewitt says he is going to work on new tools for developers and designers. On his blog, he wrote:

And so, I’m independent now, and I’m going to pour myself into understanding the needs of modern developers and designers, and creating software to fill those needs. There are so many opportunities that I can’t even predict what I will end up building, but I am pretty sure I know where I am going to start. I can’t wait.

Here is a video interview I did with Hewitt back in 2009:

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After All Facebook reported this morning that the social networking site is testing a new “Questions” feature, someone turned to Quora, the well-funded Q&A site created by former Facebook execs, to ask, “Why is Facebook creating a Q&A product to compete against Quora?” (Quora is still in private beta so you may not be able to view that page.)

Guess who should turn up but Facebook’s director of product, Blake Ross, saying, “I’ll answer this since I’m involved in the questions prototype at Facebook.” He explains that Questions is an evolution of Facebook’s former Polls product, with the idea of delivering instantaneous results to questions about logistics and recommendations. According to the screenshot on All Facebook, Questions pops up in the ad sidebar on the site — presumably to reach would-be answerers in a questioners’ network in the moment.

Ross opines that tech pundits perceive unnecessary and untrue competitive dynamics with our eagerness to declare that things are killers of other things. He says Facebook’s motivations are anything but anti-Quora:

Facebook’s experimentation in this “space” is actually a direct result of internal circumstances at the company rather than all this recent outside activity. For the last few years, we didn’t have enough engineers to make significant, sustained investments in our applications (e.g. photos and events). Earlier this year, we finally got comfortable enough with our recruiting numbers to reorganize the product engineering group into dedicated application teams of 4-5 people each. That’s why you’re suddenly seeing improvements to applications that haven’t evolved in years, such as our recent launch of higher res photos. One of our app teams is charged with experimentation and we decided to pursue this vision of real-time Q&A now that the resources were finally in place.

Ross also says that he thinks the Q&A category is misunderstood, since Quora and Aardvark have different focuses, the former a knowledge base and the latter “really fast results for more day-to-day queries.” So it sounds like what he’s saying, if I may, is that Facebook Questions is an Aardvark killer.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.