The following guest post was written by Dan Birdwhistell, founder of people directory Bigsight (reviewed here) and creator of Hacking Facebook, a website that teaches developers how to pull user data out of Facebook.
There’s one thing about Facebook that most people still seem to have wrong: that it’s a walled garden. Quite the contrary, the Platform allows for full data portability and has since its inception. It actually isn’t a walled garden at all.
The problem is that this knowledge is buried deep within the FB documentation, a place few developers have wandered. For whatever strange reason, legal documents are like amusement parks for me, so I’m now fairly well acquainted with the ins and outs of porting data (and users) out of FB. So that’s what this whole post is about: To show you how it’s done.
Background
Once we got our heads around the Platform back in October, 2007, we hacked together FriendCSV as a demonstration. This is an app that allows you to export your full social graph (and all friend data) to your hard drive. This is all done in accordance with FB policies. After people got comfortable with this, we took it a step further by allowing users instantly port their own personal data into bigsight to create a new profile and account. Test out our importer here.
Why Facebook and the Platform are important
We believe FB is architecting the next version of the web. This is a bold claim – no doubt — but here’s the thinking:
- FB has the users: 80mm and growing, with huge international membership and no age bias.
- Users enter their real information: Users enter their real name and affiliations. This moves the web away from (and makes users comfortable with abandoning) aliases.
- Users express themselves by connecting to entities that are “outside”: Users articulate their identity by claiming lasting elements like cities, companies, schools, and groups (or pages) that exist outside of FB.
- These entities are increasingly moving “in”: These groups are connecting to the same users and establishing broad footprints through ads, Pages, and Applications.
- The Platform and FB Connect are building the “between”: All the nice-happy-fun going on between Users and entities inside FB will start to extend back out into the web as developers learn how to build data/interaction bridges with the Platform and Connect.
The result is a web based on users and not content, with an individual’s FB ID ultimately serving as his chief tour guide, passport, and keymaster (but not like Vinz Clortho) around the rest of the web. So if I am right, FB will become king – not as a social network, but as the architect, owner, and manager of the next version of the web. So the point: you need to know how FB works and how you can leverage the Platform to grow your site or business. So here we go…
Understanding how FB Data is structured
Before you go messing around in the pool house, you’ll need to get your head around how everything is structured. It’s best to first focus entirely on non-user data given that these are the permanent structures users “claim”. Each of these elements has a unique ID and entry fields are typically auto-complete to ensure data alignment.
- Location: There are ~540 regional networks and ~24,000 city/state/country listings. Cities in the US are expressed as “City, State abv.” while cities in other countries are expressed as “City, Country Name”. Regional networks outside of the US, Canada, and the UK are typically expressed just as a country. Users claim locations through networks, current city, hometown, work cities, groups, pages, events, and photo albums.
- High Schools: There are ~23,000 worldwide high schools in FB. Users can enter up to two high schools, with graduation year for one of them. High school name and year is expressed on the profile.
- Colleges and Universities: FB recognizes ~5,000 institutions. To streamline search during data entry, FB allows for multiple aliases for the same school. For instance, a user can search/find/select “UCLA” or “University of California, Los Angeles”. Whichever one is selected displays on the profile, though both are linked to the same ID. This makes data integration a bit dicey, but there’s a fix we’ll get to later. Users can enter up to five schools and can ascribe graduation year, type, concentration, and degree type (if it is a grad school).
- Companies: You’ll find ~25,000 different companies. FB allows for multiple aliases during search, but it filters them out to the same display name across all profiles. We’re clueless as to why they did this for companies but not schools. Users can enter up to 15 jobs and can ascribe position, description, location, and duration.
So exactly how much data can you export?
Stated simply, you can touch basically everything but a user’s contact information. So here’s the list, including how the data is structured in its output. We’ll address friend lists and data in a moment.
| Data Element | Export Format | |
| UID | Permanent | |
| First name | Free form (ff) | |
| Last name | ff | |
| About me: | ff | |
| Activities: | ff | |
| Birthday | Day, Month, Year (1900-2008) | |
| Books | ff | |
| Colleges | Up to five: name, type, degree, concentration, grad year | |
| Hometown | “City, State” or “City, Country” if outside the US | |
| High school | Up to two: name, grad year | |
| Interests | ff | |
| “interest sex” | Male or female | |
| “interest meeting” | Friendship, Dating, Relationship, or Networking | |
| Location | “City, State” or “City, Country” if outside the US | |
| Movies | ff | |
| Music | ff | |
| # of notes | # | |
| # of wall posts | # | |
| Networks | (up to four) Region, High School, College, Work | |
| Photo albums | All pictures + tags, titles, etc. | |
| Pictures | Misc. pictures + tags, etc. | |
| Political Affiliation: | Party name | |
| Profile pictures: | 50×50, 50×150, 100×300, or 200×600 | |
| Profile update time: | Date, time | |
| Quotes: | ff | |
| Relationship Status: | Single, in a relationship, engaged, married, it’s complicated, open relationship | |
| Sex: | Male or female | |
| ID of Significant Other: | UID | |
| Status message: | ff + date/time | |
| Timezone: | # offset from GMT: “-6” for Nashville, for instance | |
| TV shows | ff | |
| Work History: | Up to 15 companies: name, position, description, location, duration |
In addition to these core profile elements, you can also make calls for and then export huge amounts of data through:
- Events: Title, location, date (duration), picture, type, members, etc.
- Pages: Name, type, location, hours, members, etc.
- Groups: Name, type, description, location, members, etc.
Now about friend lists: As you’ll see when you use FriendCSV, you can not only access all of the above for a single user, but you can also access the same data from their friends. Pretty crazy, right? This means that by touching one user you can instantly touch thousands more. But hold on now…time to talk Privacy.
Understanding FB Privacy, Terms of Service, and Platform Documentation
There are five key documents that come into play re: data portability on FB. Taken alone, each is hard enough to understand – taken together, it’s downright labyrinthine. As a developer, though, there are really only four things you need to know:
- The Onus of Privacy is on the User: While FB puts restrictions on how you can access and store information, they ultimately put the onus on the user when he interacts with an application. This means that users interact with apps at their own risk. From the Privacy Policy:
“If you, your friends, or members of your network use any third-party applications developed using the Facebook Platform, those Platform Applications may access and share certain information about you with others in accordance with your privacy settings…
…in addition, third party developers…may also have access to your personal information (excluding your contact information) if you permit Platform Applications to access your data.”
- The 24-hour Clause: Most of you have heard of this. It basically states that you can suck out any data, but you can’t store it for more than 24 hours; however, there are two key things that people overlook: 1) There are some elements that can be stored indefinitely and 2) if there is a disclaimer on the application, the developer can do almost anything with the data.
- The “Storable Indefinitely” Properties: FB allows us to store User ID, Network ID, Event ID, Group ID, and Photo ID.
- The Gold in the Mountain — “Full Disclosure Opt-Ins”: As a clear extension of FB putting the onus on the user, they have included a clause in their documentation that says that developers can do almost anything with the data they touch if they have full disclosure. Taken from 2.A.6 of the TOS:
“You may retain copies of Exportable Facebook Properties for such period of time (if any) as the Applicable Facebook User for such Exportable Facebook Properties may approve, if (and only if) such Applicable Facebook user expressly approves your doing so pursuant to an affirmative “opt-in” after receiving a prominent disclosure of a) the uses you intend to make of such Exportable Facebook Properties, b) the duration for which you will retain copies of such Exportable Facebook Properties, and c) any terms and conditions governing your use of such Exportable Facebook Properties (a “Full Disclosure Opt-In”).”
This is a bit wordy, so we’ll translate: If you outline which data you’ll use, how you’ll use it, for how long, what other terms the User might be subject to, and get User consent, then you can keep and use profile information for as long as you want.
So the main lesson here is that you shouldn’t be afraid of the various policies and documents because they are outlined to help you rather than restrict you. But again… a note about friends’ data. FB has been incredibly aggressive in policing how developers are accessing and using these data, and rightfully so. Last week they shut down the Top Friends app for allowing too much data access and earlier this year they canned Google Facebook Connect because it didn’t operate in accordance with their policies.
I’ll say again that they were right to do this and when thinking through how to port users, you should be mindful not just that FB might shut you down, but that a secondary friend who doesn’t opt-in to your site probably should be left alone. More than likely, he doesn’t want what you’re selling. Of course, there are ways around this if you want to brute force it, but we’ll just keep that to ourselves. So let’s keep going…
Setting up the Application(s) and managing the exports
Your importer can be inside FB as part of an application or it can exist as a standalone. We do it both ways. With FriendCSV, users install the app and we then direct them to their new profile as an add-on; meanwhile, out in the ether, we have a dedicated portal at http://fb.bigsight.org that directs users to FB for initial authentication, but then kicks them right back to our web app. If you already own a great app with lots of traffic, start there. If not, it’s probably best to set up your porter out on the web. Exporting the key data for a single user doesn’t take too long, so you can typically create a new page/account for them instantly. However, if you plan on exporting an element like friends lists (careful, hoss) or photos, you’ll need to batch up FQL requests when possible and also be open to allowing some processes to happen in the background.
The FB API is “REST-like,” which means it can be used by anything that handles standard HTTP requests. Libraries exist for PHP, Java, Ruby, and other languages that make the API easier to use. The following example code is for Ruby on Rails and the Facebooker library, as that’s what we use at bigsight. No matter which language you choose, writing FB applications to extract data is surprisingly easy. One line of code will tell your application to authenticate with FB. Simply add “ensure_authenticated_to_facebook” to your Rails controller and it will send your user to the FB login page if needed, and return them to your application. From that point on you have full access to the FB user and all exportable data. Here’s one example of how to extract educational history:
def gather_schools
# Create a local copy of the Facebook user
@user = User.create(:name => @fb_user.name, :fb_uid => @fb_user.uid)
# Load the user's schools
for fb_school in @fb_user.education_history
School.create(:name => fb_school.name, :user_id => @user.id)
end
end
For a full view of the FQL queries, check out this page in the documentation.
Integrating FB Data into an Existing Third Party Site
Ok so now you know what the data look like and how to access it, you need to think through a few things to figure out how to integrate it all with your site or widget. These are the questions to ask:
- What are the basic data elements you need for a user to interact with your site? Start by isolating the variables you need to a) successfully port a user to your site and b) give them enough active features that they instantly get a taste for your offering. Design your integration so that it is as simple (though complete) as possible. You might also consider including an “instant remove” link so that a user can quickly exit and take back his data.
- What deep database elements do you need to align? This might take a bit of work depending on what types of information you need. For instance, we suck out and integrate city, company, and school data. This sounds easy enough, but it gets dicey: There are quite often many names for the same entity. So if you want to align these elements, you need to: a) figure out what FB calls them and then b) use that naming system or make it line up with yours so that your importer can identify multiple aliases.
- How can you enrich user data in a novel way? There’s tons of win to be had if you can figure out a way to enrich a user’s data. We do this in two ways on bigsight:
- We match their school data against our own database and add the school logo to their profile pages. Furthermore, our school links go to pages that instantly show them people they may know. Here’s my alma mater, for instance: http://bigsight.org/school/wlu
- We built an algorithm that constructs full biographies based on a user’s profile data. This is fully dynamic and can have up to 140 different combinations depending on which school, company, and city data the user has and how he has structured it.
Basically, get creative. It’s almost silly how many cool things can be done here.
- Is there any way to leverage group, page, or event data? Check this out: http://bigsight.org/city/nashville_tn/events. This is a display of the events that I RSVP’d to in Nashville over the past year. Sucking out this data is fully legit. It doesn’t take long to realize how entirely new sites can now be built based on even one or two User imports.
- How can you set up a User account? You might have to get creative when it comes to getting information (namely email) that isn’t directly available, though often needed to set up a working account. We ask for a user’s email up front and assign them a temporary login and pw based on this.
- Are you going to store their raw data output? We highly recommend your discarding their original raw data, even if you have a full disclosure. It’s just better for everyone involved and is better for the user and the web. Remember that you can keep the User ID and if you codify the information in some way, you’re in the clear.
Conclusion
Like I said above, we believe that FB is on the path to doing something amazing with the web, and we believe that everyone in the industry needs to know how to not just adapt to it, but also thrive from (and alongside) it. It should be an interesting summer re: the web as Facebook Connect launches and more and more people begin leveraging this and the Platform for utility rather than blind user engagement.
Our opinion is that while FB Connect will offer some amazing functionality in regards to quick user integration and synching, it likely won’t be as powerful as the Platform in terms of data access. Either way, these developments will not only change how users interact with third party sites, but they will also raise the bar for user experience as individuals accustomed to the FB UI will begin to demand increased alignment. Soon we’ll likely see businesses start to build sites on the back of FB rather than a) going out on their own or b) doing what could prove to be complicated integration. Additionally, we’ll probably also find resolutions to a few ongoing discussions and questions such as who owns a friends’ list and how what FB calls “dynamic privacy” actually works out in the wild.
It’s all pretty interesting stuff to think through and incredibly fun to see it all come together so quickly. Creative destruction all around, you know. Lots of warriors in the arena. ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?
Very interesting thesis. To get there I feel they need to get the user experience right and stop the spamming of shitty apps. Lot’s of people I know don’t bother to log into FB anymore for the above reasons. Also the plattform doesn’t really support any business type interaction and it it wants to turn into the next web that is a big part of our lives.
hands down the best guest post yet. you should have given this guy his own site instead of gillmor
I second that! Awesome post - thanks for taking the time to lay it all out for others!
Cheers - Eric
blog.pickuppal.com
It would be interesting to see a post like this about Orkut since it too is a walled garden, and as popular as Facebook according to Alexa and other stats sites.
I seriously am tired of going to a website and having an interruption, “Install our facebook application?”
I won’t stay signed into facebook because of this. Most people on Facebook and Myspace just want to chat and have a fun time. After that is the spammers. After that is the business sector.
I’ll talk to people on Skype and through email if I want to do business. Social networks aren’t for that. At least that’s the way I see it.
I think that what is missing here is the definition of “Exportable Facebook Properties”. The author assumes that it is defined, and consists of ALL of the data on Facebook.
But a minor bit of searching turns this up on Facebook’s devwiki (http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/ExportableFBProperties)
“At this time, there are no exportable properties. In the event that we allow certain kinds of data to be exportable to non-Facebook applications or data repositories, we will list those properties here.”
Unless I’m mistaken, that undermines the majority of this post.
“So if I am right, FB will become king – not as a social network, but as the architect, owner, and manager of the next version of the web.”
I certainly hope you are NOT right. The last thing the web needs is a king, an owner, or a manager. What we need is data portability to make the web even more decentralized than it already has been. The web as a platform has been able to flourish precisely because no one controls it. Facebook may not seem that evil now, but if history has taught us anything, it’s that once a corporation gets absolute control over a market, they exploit it to the detriment of consumers and potential competitors.
The web needs competitors to Facebook for the same reason that the web needs Yahoo: balance and competition.
Yo Peter. Actually FB is taking pretty decisive action this month to curb spammy applications, so you’ll likely see less and less of them. I have a pretty application-free existence on FB these days outside of the ones that provide a specific utility. Furthermore, advertisers are establishing big presences within apps now and this will gradually raise the bar.
In terms of the “bridge” that I spoke of that you mention, I believe that FB has something pretty interesting up their sleeves that will make FB closer to a full operating system that the internal (and outside) communities can then operate inside of. Last year they hired in Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt and their Parakey technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parakey. So look for something out of that as well. Should be interesting.
Sanjay,
Yep when I first went through all the documentation, I noticed that and was concerned; however, it is at odds with all the other clauses in the documentation. And many things don’t always match up. However, those four key Privacy clauses I outlined do hold.
(And the fact that we clarified it with one of the people internally probably helps)
Thanks for the interesting post! But one should keep in mind that you can “export” everything with a web scraper like iMacros
http://wiki.imacros.net/Data_Extraction
Of course, that is through for all websites.
@ guest writer
The web will always need content. Yes, it’s developed another vertical in connecting people, however the web will always be best known for the transformation of information and don’t forget that. Content is king in this world, not being friends with people on the web. I don’t think this post is that awesome. Sorry…
Also @ Mike. Wouldn’t you consider this more potential information for the ability for Facebook to dissolve? I think yes….
>jason,
well, i think you are awesome.
but you’re probably wrong. a person’s social graph and his daily imprints in, around, and as expressed through the web is where content is heading. twitter, friendfeed, newsfeed, etc. is (at least temporary) proof. but again, we’ll just have to see.
This post is word-for-word identical to the articles on his site, but much easier to read.
Thanks for the breakdown.
That importer is really cool! Unlocking my data from FB is a good thing.
Great post - thank you.
Whether FB will succeed at becoming “the next version of the web” I don’t know and I think it’s a dramatization to frame the issue that way. Anyone who gets FB apps at all can see that the system they’ve set up has some cool advantages for app developers versus setting up a standalone website. And there are advantages for users as well - a single login with extendable functionality. And while it can be annoying to get the “install this app” screen, it’s easier to get through that screen than it is to sign up on a standalone website. If you find a cool app on FB you want to share with friends you’ve get a better chance at getting them to add it than you would getting them to sign up on yet another website. So there’s something there.
What is key to FB is how they behave as universal arbiter, and privacy is a cornerstone of that if not the entire foundation.
It’s interesting to see how portable FB user data actually is. Are you saying I need to do a separate opt-in to allow an app to store my birthday and high school indefinitely? The one mandatory checkbox on the “install this app” screen is “allow this app to know who I am and access my information.” How much data portability access is implied by checking that box and proceeding?
Scarabic,
Re: your last question, the truth is no one knows just yet because there hasn’t been a precedent re: exactly what constitutes a “full-disclosure opt-in”. I could easily argue that the disclaimers in the Terms and Privacy paired with the “allow this app to know…and access” already go far enough to constitute an appropriate opt-in. To be safe, I would at some place on the application/canvas pages link to a privacy or terms statement that says that the data is being stored in accordance with their consenting to use the application.
We go a step beyond that, but it might not be necessary.
through => true
Anyone who is cheerleading for there to be a “king of the web” is an idiot who should be shot. The internet is about centralized connections, not about putting the world’s social information in one company’s database. We tried long and hard to avoid this with DNS, but atleast we’ve managed to minimize the amount of centralization in DNS. But putting FaceBook in charge of the next version of the web? Are you a moron? Is FaceBook’s platform an open standard, evolvable by a standards committee like IETF or W3C? Is FaceBook restricted from altering their gatekeeper rules on a whim?
Thank you, but this isn’t even close to a proposed benign dictatorship, it’s more like fanboys who are overly invested in the F8 platform not wanting to see if federated and decentralized for fear of losing what they’ve gained.
If the web community has any sense, they will resist any sort of “next generation web OS” that requires a single company as the sole gatekeeper and policy maker.
Great article!
There is a special and important area between information we share publicly, and information we keep to ourselves only. Thats the things we want to share with family, friends, business contacts, etc. This includes photos, notes, stories, events, everything facebook is currently doing.
Facebook is on its way to doing an outstanding job to managing those relationships in an accurate way. It still has a way to go, but clearly is headed in that direction.
Awesome write-up. A sincere thanks.
Please don’t take it personally but what does 80 mm mean in “FB has the users: 80mm and growing, with huge international membership and no age bias.”? Perhaps you meant to say 80 million?
@ subset: I don’t know why you’re equating your fear of a private company owning lots of people’s data with anger toward the author. I understand if you don’t like the picture of a privately held service replacing the open web, and like I said before I think that saying it that way is an over-dramatization of what’s happening. DNS is required to use the web at all, but FB is a completely optional website to join or not join as you see fit. I don’t think anyone is genuinely prognosticating the death of the web we know before the awesome might that is Facebook. But Facebook’s platform approach and network effects do make it an interesting iteration past the mode of standalone website we’ve seen for the past ten years. That’s interesting, and so far it’s wildly successful. FB is also a subset of the web, and completely voluntary, so before you go around shooting people, keep some perspective.
I wonder if FB becoming the “new” internet will be a good thing or not? Having a system that is based more in user identity, so to speak in some ways seems to undercut some of the of corporate and media network consolidation, however, it seems that perhaps models like FB only seem to streamline the process for businesses to exploit personal information for profit?
Subset,
No no no…your are the idiot
I see what you’re saying…kinda…but you’re way too much on the side of the regulators/committees. Whatever comes next (which will be a web centered around a user having a central ID and map…be it the FB ID or something else) will come at the hands of entrepreneurs who constantly push on the bounds of what people expect and are comfortable with.
And you’re asking for open standards? Great. Let’s all join the Data Portability Project and just hope for the best.
The issue is, everything that FB does can be accomplished in an open way. If you want to talk about foundational platforms for connecting everyone in the world together socially, a network on top of the network, it should be controlled by no one. When people start talking about a next-gen web or “web os”, they are talking about a platform that is so widely used that it is effectively no-longer optional.
Whatever that next-gen network is, it should not be controlled by one company. If the social graph is to the web, what the web was to the internet, should one really be cheerleading about king making? Only if one owned FB stock I would imagine.
I think the importance of social networking tends to be overblown, but one thing is for sure. For years, my fundamental communications with my friends were open and decentralized: SMTP/IMAP/LDAP/ACAP/IRC/etc Now, we’ve got “inboxes” proliferating all over wall gardens, no way to do inter-messaging between these sites, no standards for encapsulating wall-garden messages in a neutral format (say, for MIME tunneling), address book/contacts out of my decentralized servers and boxed off.
If when Tim Berners-Lee had told everyone, that when the web was launched, the side effect would be that one day, one company would be the world’s rolodex, I think I would have said no thanks.
FB may be two steps forward, but it’s 50 steps back.
I’m on the side of regulators? The IETF has no legal enforcement, it is not a regulatory commission. I’m on the side of community spirit. You can be entrepreneurial, and at the same time, avoid designs that flip the finger to everyone else.
FB would likely retain their user base, regardless of whether they fully opened up everything. Wikipedia is still the primary site for their content, despite that fact that anyone can download their complete database.
(wowee, looks like I’m being “moderated” now, I guess the TC crowd doesn’t like anyone questioning the overhyped utopian Facebook articles here)
>>Re: your last question, the truth is no one knows just yet because there hasn’t been a precedent re: exactly what constitutes a “full-disclosure opt-in”.
Christ, this is like interpreting the 4th ammendment
Well, I think that FB wants to do the right thing but has bitten off a very huge and complex task. I hope to see them live up to it and am optimistic they will do everything they can.
Whilst its mentioned in the article, there probably should be a little bit more on the “expressly” approves.
FB have tried to outline how this needs to be done (poorly as usual), and have indicated that they frown on just a checkbox and that it is not acceptable (though you could construct one that conformed to their TOS). They have also indicated they are looking into auto-filled forms with a confirm button - though my understanding is at the moment this is acceptable to FB.
I agree the exportable properties definition is moot. There have been a number of times that FB has said its ok to export/store stuff as long as the user explicitly agrees to it and knows what the data is (and how long, and what it’ll be used for etc), as such these comments by FB constitute a definition without any other overrideing public document. Thus there is info you can store without asking (user id etc) and info that you can store if you ask the user in the correct manner.
(there’s also a Policy on the dev wiki that needs to be adhered to)
Nice post
finally something on techcrunch targetted towards techcrunch readers
I’m sure that one of the pressures FB is under when making these decisions is the desire to operate a service that isn’t constantly throwing huge TOS-likeforms up at you that prompt you to release rights over your data for myriad uses. Hell, any web designer knows that people don’t read. It just comes down to math on how many people are accustomed to clicking the “agree” box they get when installing software. The biggest and most interesting point here is that Facebook itself is almost like your computer now: it’s a platform where you run applications, and it’s full of all kinds of juicy personal info. The fact that this is happening over the web is the only new thing, but it does represent a real change and an interesting one.
Good post. We are actually doing this at http://www.theinsider.com
So, please elaborate on “didn’t operate in accordance with their policies” when talking about Google Friend Connect.
What exactly did they not do in accordance? I believe they had the right “opt-in” requirements, from what I can remember.
@9 Interesting! All of documentation on Facebook’s wiki and its message boards are consistent. I’d love to know who greenlighted it, and if we can get an official word somewhere referencable.
Ryan,
Good to see your using the Platform outside of FB, but are you getting many people buying into the FB login when you don’t give much info upfront about what exactly happens when they do?
The other day I bought some ads to test things out and when we sent them right to the app page that asks for the login (without context), people balked.
Dan, I have a question. As far as I understood, we cannot export anything and keep it anywhere else, because this would be considered “storable.” I’m wondering if there is any issue with the “Gold in the Mountains” part of what you wrote… and are there examples of other apps doing this?
Technically it was always been easy to export data, but from what I understood, their T&C said nothing can be storable, that is (afaik) RETRIEVABLE by any other non-FB system.
I ask because I would love an application which would allow an export to my system (JibberJobber.com). I think that each user should be able to take at the very least, their own friends info, and put that into something else (whether it’s a spreadsheet, Salesforce.com, JibberJobber.com, etc.).
Even though I would love this, and it’s technically possible… I was always under the impression that this is against FB T&C. However, if all we need to do is put our own little disclaimer, and make it double opt-in… wow… this is awesome!
Can you comment on that? Thanks a ton!
Jason Alba
CEO - JibberJobber.com
Very insightful article! I’ve done a lot of development on Facebook but never knew about the opt-in clause that could allow for long term data storage.
I’m launching a social media website soon and will definately look into allowing users to import Facebook profile data. I’m actually not so interested using this data to populate user profiles as I am interested in feeding it into our recommendation engine. With that kind of user insight our rec engine could do some pretty cool stuff.
Gabe,
Check out how these guys at LivingSocial are pushing internal fb reviews/recommendations outside of FB: http://readers.livingsocial.com/entities/leaders. Lots of fun stuff is going on there.
Jason,
Yep you can import user data with a disclaimer/opt-in, but I’d say avoid anything with their friend lists for the moment. Facebook Connect comes out later this summer (we think) and that will give us all more clarity re: use of friend lists.
Until then, yeah, start designing something and just get working on it. Now’s the time.
d
Great post!
Facebook is probably one of the most powerful company right now around the world and I can’t say that them letting their guards down like that is not deceitful…but still them planning to put a lot of money in acquiring the title for the most powerful company makes me believe they’ll be allright, check it out:
http://www.themostpowerfulcompany.com
Have any of you seen a C&D from Facebook? I have. I talked to their lawyer. They sent 2 security experts, 1 from Europe and the other Australia to come after me.
I was creating indexes of social network web pages to SEARCH. I didn’t even index Facebook.
They are largely paranoid and have far too big a budget for their own good.
There are better social networks to interface. MySpace seems like the best one. As bad as they are were, they seem to be very reasonable today. Facebook largely sees people as their opponent in some type of game that only they are playing.
If anybody wants a copy of the C&D, I can forward it to you. I didn’t sign any non-disclosure agreement with them.
AMAZING post.
At this point of time.. I’m writting (mostly written) an service to do… well.. pull out loads of information from user’s friends and mash em up in a really large way. Hence this would help!
Thanks!
http://www.techlusive.com/pics/Faceb001.PDF
This is the C&D. There was no copyright notice on it and I did not sign a non-disclosure agreement. Like I said I was building a social search engine that merely indexed web pages such as Google does. A Facebook module was built but never used to index the site due to the TOS, in the eventuality that one day they would allow robots to search the profiles and index them off site. I’ll probably end up donating it to this website and the EFF:
chillingeffects.org
My company is no longer perusing social search because the other websites that did, could not monetize to the best of my knowledge.
wow… this is awesome!ah…:)
80mm users (myspace has more, orkut has the same); but (1) how many are fake (I have several FB acconts); (2) how many are active (attrition) - vs. 1,407,724,920* worldwide internet users.
I think anyone has a long, long way to go before becoming “architect and king” of the web, and let me yell from my soapbox now that it would suck if anyone becomes “king” of the internet, let alone a company run by a 23 year old.
*Souce: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
A great post ..But not very useful for non-techies like me.
Also agree with No. 44(some dummy) on the issue that the real statistics that should be seen is the Active subscribers every month
Hey Dan do you have some resources good for people literally just getting into facebook ap development? I know searching google is easy enough, but would love to know if you have some really solid resources you can direct me to.
Slide been founding partner of facebook platform, the platform that put a milestone in internet history, shouldnt have done this having millions of users.
They blatantly violated platform policy and should be sued in court for this offense by facebook - to keep their integrity and make users feel secure.
read this, went over and signed up for facebook, damn, am ashamed of myself
Nice write up, thanks.
Facebook? Really?
1 type of revenue stream, advertising and 1 type of value, connecting you with people… oh yeah and super poking. /sigh
Can’t wait till the niches pull their heads out and start stealing people away form FB because niches offer more value to a person and ALSO connects them with others. Plus advertisers would rather pay a niche site with a million users than a mish mash of users of 80 million. Advertisers want quality, not quantity.
Just because they were the first biggest, doesn’t mean they’ll last. i.e. Netscape. - FB value is so weak if you think about how it really adds value to your life, other than super poking and connecting with friends.
There has to be more than just connecting and expressing yourself to others. /yawn
The next gen of the web isn’t facebook, but a social network that adds 4 or 5 types of high value and 4 or types of revenue streams. Sure FB will have elements to help push into web3.0, but the value to most people over 25 is low. Now if you have a 35 year old who is passionate about golf and gets to talk to Tiger Woods, earn incentive points to buy golf stuff for cheap, play certain courses at 25% off and talk to others golfers around the world; now you are getting closer to adding high value to people. And if this golfer was on FB, it won’t be long for him to realize that this new golf social network offers the same thing as FB, expect it means a lot more to my life.
FB /yawn