• Boomtown at al., Friday, September 3, 2010 12:55 PM

Both hugely ambitious company men, reports portray the relationship between Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg as increasingly close. Complicating matters, though, there was no sign of any Facebook connection on the iTunes-based social network that Apple debuted this week, due to what Jobs called "onerous" contractual demands.

Sources now tell BoomTown that Facebook denied Apple access to APIs that would have allowed it to search for an iTunes user's friends on Facebook who had also signed up for Apple's new social service, Ping. "Normally, this API access is open and does not require permission," writes BoomTown. "That is, unless some entity wants to access it a lot ... With 160 million iTunes users, that could potentially mean a lot of impact."

"The absence of Facebook Connect -- a tool that enables Facebook users to synchronise their profile on the social networking site with other partner websites -- surprised technology watchers, who had expected it to be integrated in to the Ping platform," writes The Telegraph (UK).

The result? "Anyone wading into [Ping] will find an empty community save a few artists (Lady Gaga, Yo-Yo Ma) and a few potential followers (Rick Rubin)," Fast Company explains. Still, as BoomTown and other publications note, it looks like Facebook could still be heading for Ping.

Writes CNet: "A Facebook spokeswoman wouldn't confirm whether the company had disallowed Apple's use of the Facebook API, but did say this: 'We're working with Apple to resolve this issue. We've worked together successfully in the past, and we look forward to doing so in the future.'"

"Once Apple and Facebook come to an agreement, we can expect the feature to be re-enabled," notes an optimistic VentureBeat. "Having access to Facebook is key for any budding service with a social spin, and even Apple will eventually have to come to terms with that."

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