People seem to be intepreting this as "OMG now we can build a new social network and convert users easily!"
Users still aren't going to leave Facebook. Facebook realizes this, which is why they can do this now. Your mother's cousin is on Facebook. She won't be on Diaspora or (X). That said, this is pretty cool for its own reasons. Like waterlesscloud said, it looks like they "want to be the source of all social interactions on the web without having monolithic control."
This is definitely a smart move for Facebook -- be willing to give a little on data portability to position themselves as open.
Facebook has a gigantic ecosystem. Thousands of sites use Facebook Connect to provide social context and are predicated on everyone interesting have a Facebook account. A social network is a very complicated webapp -- probably the most complex many of its users interact with on a daily basis -- and literally hundreds of millions of users don't want to have to re-learn that. Remember that we're talking about here: take, for example, the http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_yo... incident. They have such tremendous inertia that even being able to one-click import your data to another app isn't likely to damage them.
This move is kind of like Jobs saying, "all smartphones have problems. We're not perfect. But we're trying to do the best of anyone." At least for the moment, it's changed the discourse from "wow Facebook supports developers terribly" to "hey, Facebook's not entirely a walled garden!": what Scott Adam's called the "high ground maneuver".
Facebook has the most users in one place, but the dust is nowhere near settled on where everyone will end up.
This bodes very well for a decentralized solution. I doubt Diaspora will be the first (I think Appleseed (http://opensource.appleseedproject.org) is much more likely), but ultimately, it will be an easily implemented protocol with mature cross-platform libraries that'll really take it down.
This is a good PR move on Facebook's part, because it willfully misinterprets people's frustrations with Facebook. It's not that you didn't have a local copy of your data, it's that you had no control over your data when it was out in the wild. This will take some wind out of the sails of the decentralized solutions, but the armada is still coming.
It seems like the majority of the non-Facebook figure comes from Chinese language sites. Since social networking sites will quite likely be segmented by language for the foreseeable future, I don't think this really counts. In the English-language world, Facebook has serious network effect and you would be hard-pressed to combine all of FB's competitors into anything.
I agree dispersed social networking is coming... I'm not sure if "control" of data is the way to phrase the "problem"... Still, creating a dispersed network where each contributor controls where their data goes is a very hard problem.
Sort by Registered Users. You don't even need the Chinese language site (QZone).
Habbo + MySpace + Bebo + Orkut + Friendster + Hi5 = 679 million. Assuming 50% cross-over (which is a very high estimate), that means 340 million unique users, for just six social networks.
The sites I hadn't heard of aren't Chinese language sites but failed English language sites. But they are still failed sites. I don't go to my two Myspace pages, ever.
And in India, where Orkut used to be big, almost everyone I know has migrated to Facebook, so those numbers include a large number of accounts no one is using
The thing is, I doubt a decentralized social networking approach would really be allowed by the Chinese government. This kind of solution can only really gain ground in very open countries if at all...
Tons of working features, a more well-defined roadmap, (much) more experience, and it's way easier to install (LAMP vs Rails). Also, Appleseed is a full social platform, that allows you to build components and extend it. Diaspora is more of a single application, it doesn't have any kind of modular framework to build off of. I don't think Diaspora will ever be dead in the water, but it just has so much catching up to do, and not small stuff, big architectural stuff that doesn't really benefit from the "many eyeballs" advantage of popular open source.
My sister is in four social networks other than Facebook. I don’t think it matters. (Five if you insist on counting MySpace.) She would pick Facebook if she had to.
> The combined size of social networks that aren't Facebook is over 1.5 billion people, probably more.
How much of that overlaps with Facebook? Approximately 500 million? Also, they're measuring total registrations: FB has probably close to a billion registrations on their 500 million actives. All that statistic tells you is that FB has room to grow.
Let's assume there's total overlap, meaning everyone who has a non-FB account also has a FB account. Now let's assume all of those smaller, but substantially sized, networks started inter-communicating. Who would stay on Facebook? Why would you stay on the centralized network with 500 million people when you can spend all your time on the open network with 1.5 - 2 billion people?
As for active versus registrations, we can't be sure of that from anyone, but rest assured, a decentralized network has much greater potential than Facebook does. Especially in the rest of the world where Facebook isn't nearly as popular.
500 million vs 1.5 billion is a meaningless metric regarding which social network people will use. They will use the one their friends are using, and no one has near enough friends for those gigantic numbers to have any relevance.
It's a useless metric in regard to an individual person's decision to use facebook as opposed to something else. People don't care that facebook has 5 million users, they care that their friends use it. If all/most of their friends started using something else, they would too, regardless of whether that new network had 5 billion people or 5 hundred.
The majority of MS windows users don't use Linux either, and the fact that Linux did not run MS apps did not keep a community from pushing forward what an OS and app ecosystem can do.
I'm not thinking 'OMG now I can convert users!', I'm saying, 'Cool, I can possibly evolve what a social network can do for me and a group of friends, while working with the FB ecosystem.'
Facebook will have to build features for the masses - we can build social networks for the subsets of users. We can convince users to download their piece of the social graph by offering a unique niche experience, and getting creative about what it means to interact socially online for the subsets of the masses.
Today's announcement was more than a 'high-road' PR stunt. To extend the linux analogy, FB just made it easy for each user to create a virtual machine where we can run a niche social network side by side with the gigantic ecosystem that is facebook.
This is what I was thinking. FB has reached the marketshare where it's fairly safe for them to relax the control they hold, because even if a variety of open rivals appear, using the data that FB releases, FB will still be the centre of the action.
Alternatively, there may be a parallel to IBM giving away the PC specs, inadvertently pushing the monopoly down to the OS and weakening their market position (though creating a tech boon for everyone that made the market so much bigger).
frisco, very well put! "Wind makes a small fire expire but makes a large one bigger", as you state, I guess FB now feels they're pretty much invincible in their user stickiness, so they don't feel threatened. In fact, as people build other services off this data, they'll have even more visibility (if that's possible).
The biggest advantage Facebook has is that 500 million people have an account. Facebook would be utterly useless if nobody was using it. Network effects make Facebook hard to beat, not your data. They need your data only to make money but they get your data because you and your mom and everyone else have an account.
That's what I mean, they have the data of 500 million people. But if those people want to move on having an easy export feature will make things much easier.
When everyone moved from MySpace to Facebook they had to re-do their profile in the new system. Hopefully when FooThingy replaces Facebook importing will be just a click away.
I don't think you agree with his point. Most people have no desire to move on from Facebook not because moving their data is a hassle, but because everyone they know is on Facebook.
Everyone didn't move from MySpace to Facebook. Facebook pulled in many, many new people.
I really didn't mean to speculate on whether Facebook would be replaced by something else. Maybe they'll become big enough that nothing will ever replace them.
But if something does replace them having an API to export the existing data will be critical to the adoption of the new system.
Even if all your friends use Facebook now, having an export API is the difference between them clicking on one link (and "approve") to move your data to the new system, and having to start all over again.
Lowering the barrier of entry will do a lot to increase competition in this area. Hopefully Facebook will institute meaningful data export policies like Google has done.
I think the data is one part of the equation ... its definitely a 'nice to have' feature on the next shiny social media app, but you have to remember a lot of the data posted on facebook by people isn't all that valuable to them anyway (except maybe photos and notes).
I think the benefactors of stuff like this are sites like flickr, blogger or tumblr, since it seems you can export out your photos/notes and start a new photostream/blog.
And people have been making your point ever since Facebook opened up to the general population. But MySpace, even in its heyday, wasn't nearly as big as Facebook was a year or two ago.
It's not the number of people using it that matters so much as who those people are and how they use it.
Myspace was most popular among high school kids, indie music culture, and people looking for dates. Many people in their 20s and 30s started using it to keep in touch with old friends and make new contacts but it never grew beyond that. By the time they implemented the news feed, it was too late. Facebook had already gotten the momentum.
Now, people (and organizations) of all sorts have Facebook profiles and pages. Families, adults, colleagues, friends, new acquaintances, all use Facebook to stay connected. Sure, the kids will almost certainly find something new to play with soon, but that won't matter anymore.
Facebook is huge, and now pretty clearly shows enormous potential to continue growing.
I think Facebook has designed this feature very carefully so as to make sure it doesn't make it easier for another platform to use this as a data import feature. First, the process to get your data is not "click a button and download" but "click a button - wait for emailed link - download". This means that unless you are comfortable giving the new platform access to your inbox, they can't get your data.
Secondly, Mark seemed to be pretty clear in his reply to the last question: The information you download will not contain any information about your friends. It won't have their contact details. I am not sure if it will have a list of their names, but without an email address, such a list would be largely useless to any new platform.
So yeah, I think this is a pretty crafty P.R. move, a decent feature for users (hey, being able to download all my FB photos and videos would mean I have to stop worrying about backing them up), but this is not going to help new social networks recruit users.
That seems like it also reduces some of the potential security downsides. You probably don't want a situation where tricking a user into giving up their password results in the ability to instantly pull huge piles of information.
It certainly reduces the potential security downside for Facebook. If someone tricks you into giving up your email password, they could get all of your email but is that a valid argument against letting you download all of your contacts and emails?
unless you are comfortable giving the new platform access to your inbox, they can't get your data
Huh? You receive a link to a zip file, which you then download. Your statement would be pretty FUDly if it weren't so busy being wrong.
I am not sure if it will have a list of their names, but without an email address, such a list would be largely useless to any new platform.
If your friend also dumps their Facebook data into the new platform, they could be trivially identified as your friend by Facebook id. If ids are scrubbed from all of the data (unlikely), any decent competing service should have the ability for you to find your friends.
this is not going to help new social networks recruit users
On the contrary, this provides everything that a new social network could ask for. It makes it simple for a user to collect all of their data for import into another site. But here's the amazing part: this has been an open possibility since the f8 conference in April:
The convenience and openness of this latest feature show how confident Facebook is that people won't leave, and they're right. Facebook has become a well regarded premium household brand, and that's extremely difficult to overcome. There is no credible competition at this point, and it will take years to build something which is merely a better loser than MySpace.
>>unless you are comfortable giving the new platform access to your inbox, they can't get your data
>Huh? You receive a link to a zip file, which you then download. Your statement would be pretty FUDly if it weren't so busy being wrong.
I'm assuming the grandparent is talking about an automated site that imports from facebook by asking for my facebook username and password. This can't work, because the zip link goes to my e-mail, so I either have to copy-paste the link from my e-mail or provide my e-mail address and e-mail password as well, as the grandparent said. Your statement would pretty wrong if it weren't so busy being rude :-P
Your statement would pretty wrong if it weren't so busy being rude
It was rude, and deliberately so. The parent brazenly said something that was wholly wrong, which was well received with no dissent. If I care about the quality of information on Hacker News it is my duty to call attention to this situation. A downvote is not sufficient.
I either have to copy-paste the link from my e-mail or provide my e-mail address and e-mail password as well
This is email! Forward it to signmeup@newsocialnetwork.com! Or, if you read the link I included, you might conclude that any new social network could create a Facebook application capable of automatically obtaining the same data.
My brashness comes from my amazement at the utter lack of imagination here, combined with the idea that people "really want to leave Facebook." Facebook has been quick to respond to negative publicity. They make a product with impressive uptime, that hundreds of millions of people are glued to. They aren't afraid of anyone leaving.
My comment was based on Mark's statements. The actual video is at [1]. Scroll forward to 1:26:30. I'll try to quote the relevant parts verbatim:
Reporter: "Do you actually get your friends contact info as well. is any of the data in a format that can be easily imported?"
Mark: What we are focusing on today is your information...not your friends information, because that is not your information..
That clearly seems to me like they will be scrubbing not just IDs but also email addresses of my friends when I download my data. So when I take my data to a new service, I am not taking my friends with me. This means any new social network that I want to export my friend data to still has to go via the Facebook API. And what's the catch with that?
What Facebook doesn't allow anyone who uses their API to do is use data you get from them to target ads to users even if the user consents.
See their terms, 9.6, for developers:
You will not directly or indirectly transfer any data you receive from us to (or use such data in connection with) any ad network, ad exchange, data broker, or other advertising related toolset, even if a user consents to that transfer or use.
Further, the new social network, a Facebook competitor, would continue to be dependent on Facebook and any future changes to their TOS which they are forever subject to.
A bunch of people thought that with the user now free to export all their data and import it into a new social network, platforms competing with FB, who want to source data from FB, would be able to do so without consenting to Facebook's terms like the one above and permanently free them from future changes to Facebook's terms. Clearly that is not the case, since using the Graph API means you are still subject to these terms.
I was not making any statements about Facebook's confidence or lack thereof. And sure there is no credible competition at this point, but that's my point. Competition is good.
Finally, you said:
It was rude, and deliberately so...it is my duty to call attention to this situation. A downvote is not sufficient.
If you think that calling attention to factual inaccuracies requires being rude, I think you have misjudged HN as a discussion platform and, in my opinion, misunderstood the general rules of conversation as well. I'll leave it at that.
I never implied that people "really want to leave Facebook". May be you should stop conflating opinions expressed in other comments with mine.
That clearly seems to me like they will be scrubbing not just IDs but also email addresses of my friends when I download my data.
What do you base this on? "not your friends information, because that is not your information" suggests to me that you cannot download your friends' photos and status updates. That says nothing specifically of your friends' Facebook ids, which (privacy settings permitting) are public to the point of being indexed by Google.
Further, the new social network, a Facebook competitor, would continue to be dependent on Facebook and any future changes to their TOS which they are forever subject to.
Only for future updates. If someone wanted to leave, they could.
What I dislike about your line of reasoning is that it presupposes that nothing has really changed, when the reality seems to be very different. Not only have developers been given access to Facebook data, they are allowed to cache it indefinitely (bound only to the user requesting removal). This is a radical departure from last year.
I feel that it is important for this to be recognized on Hacker News, because this is the community that would most benefit from realizing that the field has changed. The social space has become more open (maybe temporarily) to competition, but this also signals that the incumbent has a strong enough position to allow this. A year or two ago, you might worry that Facebook would prevent you from getting any traction. Now you only have to worry that creating a competing network is so hard that Facebook thinks no one can do it.
If you think that calling attention to factual inaccuracies requires being rude
No, it doesn't. But it does get skin in the game, and at the right time that can be valuable. Also my self-description of rudeness is also an overstatement of a single sentence in my first post in this discussion. I hope that the rest of my commentary has not been viewed as such (maybe curt, but hopefully not rude).
I never implied that people "really want to leave Facebook"
Sorry if that was implied, it was a comment on the zeitgeist of Hacker News and not you specifically.
Kudos. This fixes my biggest criticism of Facebook. I'm going to be a lot more comfortable using it now. The moving target privacy policies are a bit of an issue still, but I'm willing to give them a half pass on that as the price of innovation.
If their PR department influences their engineers to implement features that I want, good for them. I'm not inclined to care which part of the organization made the proposal.
I think it's simple, facebook needed a good strategy because of all the shit that hit the fan in the recent past, so they put a fresh new face on it and spread the love of openness where they can afford it.
I'm fine with it, download or not it doesn't change my view of them. Any company that has that kind of information at its disposal is to be treated with caution.
Can't one treat faceook with caution and at the same time, enjoy their services, and sing their praises? I often praise entities while maintaining quite cautionate.
I think I understand what you mean: a critic generally wants to have his or her point of view understood and acted upon, to which you could conclude that they might ultimately want to be able to be silent.
EDIT: maybe I didn't understand what you mean ;)
However, I'd argue that a single act is really just a grand gesture. To expect to silence critics with such a gesture is unrealistic - and doesn't do anything to positively resolve the issues involved with any cause worth fighting for.
The privacy issues that Facebook might need to address are deep and wide ranging. Facebook instigates cultural change - it's the nature of that change which should be up for debate.
Okay, to a degree I'm playing semantics .. but silencing an opinion isn't the same as reaching a resolution. To 'quell' suggests a pointed action, which puts the purpose of quietening the critic's voice, above resolving the critic's concern.
You know, what exactly can Facebook do to make people like you happy?
Facebook has to make money to do this they have to have users to do this they have to make a good product to do this they have to hire good engineers and to do that they have to make money, oh and if they're super evil no one will want to work for them, let alone use their product
Facebook really isn't as evil as most of these comments make out, and the fact Facebook lets you download your data isn't good enough makes you, whatever the opposite of a fanboy is, to Facebook.
Can I download my data off Google? Flickr? Any other major consumer site? Amazon doesn't hold my hand if I want to move to another service.
If you assume anything non-evil that a company does is "because the PR says so" I pity your outlook on the world.
Here's what I think. I don't think Facebook is evil. I think Facebook is young and they're pushing the boundaries of the web, and sometimes - sometimes - they over step a line and do something wrong. And what do Facebook do? They apologize. They change the features. And it doesn't make any difference to people like you.
Oh and by the way, normal users don't give a shit about any of this.
"Hi, this is facebook, this time we've really learned from our past mistakes.
I know you've heard that before (several times in fact), but this time we actually mean it and we'll show you how and why.
To begin with, from now on we will detail the commercial activities that we engage in with your data and we will allow you to say yes/no to every individual transaction. We wouldn't be a commercial entity if we didn't find a way to make that to our advantage though, so here is the deal: Every time we have a commercial proposition you get a link in your email and a notice on your wall. You can configure to default 'accept', 'deny' or 'hold until confirmation'. If you default to accept and you do nothing the deal is on. If you default to 'deny' then the deal is off, unless you decide to accept anyway through the link on your wall. If you default to 'hold until confirmation' then you will only be able to proceed after the terms and conditions of this particular deal have been made clear to you and accepted by you through an extra confirmation step.
Our advantage in all this is that we hope you will visit facebook more frequently to check up on us.
Of course we hope that you will trust us with your data, but given our recent antics we fully understand if you want to put us 'on probation'.
As for the why part, we've decided that we'd rather make a bit less money in the sort term and be around in the long term as opposed to chasing you away or giving a competitor enough air-supply to make our lives miserable.
We sincerely apologize for our past behavior.
As another token of our newly found conscience we will create a board of 10,000 randomly selected users that get to vote on changes that will affect privacy in a negative way, the advice of this board will be binding on us. What with facebook now being larger than most countries we figure democracy is the best way forward. We're making this a sampled democracy rather than a representative one to limit the impact on the day-to-day dealings with our site, however if you want to you are always eligible to vote on any proposals the board votes on and your vote will count just as heavy as a board members.
It appears that it's built as an app that crawls the graph, zips up all your media, photos, videos, etc. Once unzipped, it seems to be html based, browsable format.
Based on this I think its safe to say that even without explicit APIs you could easily whip up some parsers, accept one of these zip files, and pull all the data into your own app.
I'm curious what exactly this means. Are they going to be exposing this via the graph API so that the data can be programatically used to port from one network to another? If not then I don't really see the value of this except for marketing and goodwill.
If they do expose it via the graph API then that truly is a big deal :).
I don't really see the value of this except for marketing and goodwill.
Don't underestimate the power of marketing and goodwill.
More specifically: This feature may make it really hard to sell the average Facebook user on the value of a "more open" system. It will appear to solve 80% of the problem and the other 20% is hard for nonprogrammers to understand.
GEEK: "Come use our Facebook alternative! It's open, and all your data belongs to you!"
USER: "But Facebook is a platform for sending stuff to my friends. It's for things I want to share, not things I want to keep for myself."
GEEK: "But what if Facebook crashes and all your data is lost? Or what if you want to get all those photos back out of Facebook and stuff them into your new photo frame, or something?"
USER: "No problem, I'll use Facebook's download feature. In fact, I stuffed a downloaded copy into Dropbox just last week. [1]"
GEEK: "But Facebook's download feature doesn't include social graph metadata, so you can never put the links all back together again."
USER: "Wait, what did you just say? It sounded like TECH TECH TECH TECH to me."
I'm guessing that, no matter what this feature really is, it will probably accomplish my real-life use case: "My wife uploaded all her photos to Facebook and now I want them back." That's a nice win.
---
[1] Note that I posited a really sophisticated Facebook user who understands the value of periodic offsite backups. Because even that user probably doesn't know what a "social graph" is.
The Techcrunch notes are hard to decipher, being taken real time and all. But it sounds like they're doing something very interesting. Like they want to be the source of all social interactions on the web without having monolithic control.
Which, as Zuckerberg seems to be saying, is a difficult task to balance indeed.
I would love this. I use BackupMyTweets.com, but I didn't know it existed until I had around 3500, so my first 300 or so updates are missing. (They might be on Facebook; after I download my data, I'll see when I started importing updates from Twitter.)
Perhaps some people need to realise that using Facebook involves creating data, in the same sense that creating documents in MS Word or Excel creates files.
This might be an important step in educating people to think differently about what Facebook is and what the implications of using it might be - for instance, not many people like the idea of a stranger gaining access to the files on their local hard disk. In many ways, the privacy implications involved in using Facebook are similar.
I wrote a similar Python script[1] a couple of months ago that crawls the Graph API and downloads all your Facebook notes and photos. I recently started work on the script again, but after today's announcement, I will probably stop development. Oh well.
Regardless of whatever intentions fb has behind this, it honestly makes me feel warmer towards fb and their service. It now feels more like a personal data store that I can retrieve when I please.
Lets say I can convince all of my friends to download and continually sync their FB data. Then, I build a desktop app or web service on top of an open, distributed network with a UI that encompasses most of the features that people use on FB.
It seems like I could interact with my friends, still use facebook as I please, and gradually evolve my social media interactions towards a more open, distributed network.
Any reason why we would not see a handful of such projects emerge?
My feeling: we are already so close to hitting the lock in point with Facebook, that although many projects will emerge, they will ultimately go nowhere, despite data portability and genuine interest in alternatives.
Isn't this a great opening for a small FaceBook personal data backup startup? Just forward the email with the download link to them, and backups start happening even without signup (since it's all email-linked). If you want them to continue, pay some small monthly charge.
I think this would be more interesting if it included the behavior profile facebook keeps on you. I've read articles where they describe tracking every page you visit, when, how many times and for how long. Facebook is interested in knowing which of your friends you're paying attention to, who comments you read and which photos you like.
I would like to see their "file" on me. I would like that to be more transparent to users who don't realize it's being kept as well.
Google started doing something like this where they let you see (and delete?) the browsing and search histories they keep based on your gmail account, google cookies and advertising partners logs.
I have been contemplating leaving Facebook for a few months - - not just because of some of the privacy issues, but also because I feel like it's been a timesuck with little payoff. I have held off because of pictures, mostly.
I don't have access to the tool yet, but if it pulls off all my photos and other content, I'm likely to delete my facebook account.
Some people complain that they can't delete all the data from facebook, and while I get the complaint, that's certainly not a reason to stick around or not delete. If they are saving everything, and I delete my account, at least they can't save anything new going forward.
I'm glad Facebook did this. I've wished for a long time that Google had this feature since I care about my Google Mail and Google Docs a lot more than my Facebook Status updates. This is a step in the right direction for people like me that backs up my twitter updates because Twitter is sometimes does not give you access to your entire history. More services should implement similar features, I'm sure that companies like will create import tools for this data.
Now, if only Facebook simplified it's process to delete an account...
It's a smart move to offer a backup tool, especially when enforcing a TOS that's subject to interpretation and causes (alleged) violators to complain very loudly in public forums when their accounts are permanently canceled and their data becomes inaccessible. They'll get less sympathy this way ("You backed up your data, didn't you?"), although the most important thing here is that all users are given a chance to feel that they own their own data. That's more than a mere PR move, it's a perceived right.
I don't see it in my facebook account pages. Is it not operational yet? I'd love to be able to back up all of my posts, comments, like, and photos. Is that what this is saying?
"People own and have control over all info they put into Facebook and “Download Your Information” enables people to take stuff with them"
I don't find that very true. I don't think one has control unless one personally hosts the data. You have control over deleting your account and now control over downloading your data. This says nothing about how the ("the" not "your") data is to be used and what can be done with it outside your control.
This looks like a pure fluff announcement to me -- it's not enabling any new functionality. Mark Zuckerberg even said that this is built on top of the Graph API so anyone could have built this app but no one cares.
It looks to me like facebook slipped on the deadline to launch whatever they've been in "lockdown" for and they had to scramble to put this and the other minor things together for the press.
So all those donations to the Diaspora project seem to have paid off, but not in the way we expected. Instead of it spawning an alternative to Facebook, it put sufficient pressure on Facebook to compel them to allow users to easily download and port their data any time they want to. The internet works in mysterious ways, doesn't it?
I wonder if they're going to provide all revisions of all data you've ever given them, or just the most recent version. It looks like it's only the most recent stuff.
Just imagine the look on her face when your mother's cousin opens the zip file and sees every piece of profile text she's ever typed in it. Creeeeeeeepy.
So, would we expect to see downloadable user apps that use this data in this particular format and do crazy things like visualise one's activity on FB over the past few years? How much would an average person's data be on FB (apart from pictures/videos): few megabytes of compressed data?
Is there any way to export your contacts including email and phone numbers? I know there was a greasemonkey script for it a while back, but facebook had apparently changed the html enough that it didn't work when I tried it.
Privacy and data portability are two separate concerns. For those of us who don't post unwanted information online, we are only really concerned with the latter. For us, this is a big win.
This seems pretty interesting - it's a good opportunity for sites like Flickr and the like to allow 'Facebook Zip' uploads and they'll automatically parse out your photos and store them in your account.
People may feel more open when they are sharing a .zip rather than 'logging in' - I know a lot of people that are still opposed to 'connecting' accounts - this avoids that connection, regardless of OAuth, straight username/password, etc.,
It's not clear to a lot of people 'what exactly' they are sharing when they link accounts, but when you upload a .zip, you are ONLY sharing what's contained in that file - there really is a big difference between uploading and linking =p
Question for you all.
A bit ago, I posted the following, which was in minutes at -5 and counting:
-----------------------------------
This is disturbing. Yes, Facebook was sharing your information before -- it was the source of all their ad revenue. But now, instead of individual pieces of data (location, specific interests, etc.), they have the potential to share (read:sell) an entire person's worth of data in a lump. Not saying it will happen immediately, or at all, but I see some serious possibility for harm here. (Cross-site behavior tracking just got a whole lot scarier, if you can link it to a FB profile...)
Of course, there could be some serious academic applications to this, too.
And it makes them look more open, and access to your own data is good.
-----------------------------------
I'm on HN to learn, but the downvotes told me nothing. (No child comments.) So in the interest of writing better comments (and hopefully improving my own analyses), what's wrong with this one?
Is it the cynical outlook? Is there something factually incorrect? Is mine just an unpopular opinion?
I'm looking for feedback, because I didn't expect my comment to bomb like it did.
Your comment just didn't make any sense. They already have all of this information. How on earth does giving it to you in a zip file make it more likely for them to sell it to other people?
I didn't downvote you, but here is what I think may have motivated the downvoters:
Assuming facebook is using some form of SQL doing that would be as simple as "SELECT INTO OUTFILE" with the appropriate clauses, so this doesn't add anything whatsoever to the threat from the direction of facebook.
If someone manages to hack in to your facebook account it's become marginally easier, but a well written bot would have a lesser problem digging out your profile than you as a user would, so facebook just made it a bit easier for users to get at their own data at 0 cost to them, and with a negligible security risk in the case of a compromised account.
That does not detract from the fact that I think that this is largely a PR move and that any real benefit is quite small, other than for those people that would like to have their data in several places.
In those cases facebook probably comes out ahead because you now only have to upload to facebook to be able to export it to another service (I don't think it will be long before the first 'import' utilities will be made).
Had an exam earlier... hasn't done well for my brainpower.
Of course they already have the data, and as you mention, exporting it is fantastically easy from their end.
My line of thinking probably evolved from the ease with which Facebook could just push the entire zipped file to purchasers, instead of just the relevant info. This is incorrect in that 1) I wouldn't imagine facebook shares its actual data, just uses it to allow advertisers to target their ads, and 2) even if they did, I seriously doubt they would group data by user thoroughly enough to be identifiable.
Half of my concern was what would be accessible via facebook connect, and the ability of a malicious website to harvest scary amounts of personal information via this + cross-site user tracking (about which, admittedly, I know almost nothing). Again, the data dump is only about ease of access, not a totally new ability.
I'm also talking about things I don't really know about. I've never used fb connect, nor do I have experience with cross-site user tracking. But I'm certainly under the impression that it would be possible to combine these two concepts into something disturbing. (http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1250497 would seem to imply that a large advertising network could do this sort of thing (though I'm not sure where the fbconnect info would come from, exactly).
Users still aren't going to leave Facebook. Facebook realizes this, which is why they can do this now. Your mother's cousin is on Facebook. She won't be on Diaspora or (X). That said, this is pretty cool for its own reasons. Like waterlesscloud said, it looks like they "want to be the source of all social interactions on the web without having monolithic control."
This is definitely a smart move for Facebook -- be willing to give a little on data portability to position themselves as open.
Facebook has a gigantic ecosystem. Thousands of sites use Facebook Connect to provide social context and are predicated on everyone interesting have a Facebook account. A social network is a very complicated webapp -- probably the most complex many of its users interact with on a daily basis -- and literally hundreds of millions of users don't want to have to re-learn that. Remember that we're talking about here: take, for example, the http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_yo... incident. They have such tremendous inertia that even being able to one-click import your data to another app isn't likely to damage them.
This move is kind of like Jobs saying, "all smartphones have problems. We're not perfect. But we're trying to do the best of anyone." At least for the moment, it's changed the discourse from "wow Facebook supports developers terribly" to "hey, Facebook's not entirely a walled garden!": what Scott Adam's called the "high ground maneuver".