Facebook?s Friends Data Has Already Left the Barn

[tbyg52]

Source: Washington Post

How much are your friends worth? That is the question behind the big debate going on around social networks and data portability. In the last ten days, Facebook, Google, and MySpace have all announced ways to let people access their data (including friends lists) from other sites, except that what they are really trying to do is erect new walled gardens by positioning themselves as the primary repository of that personal and social data. This is valuable data and none of the big players want to cede any more of it than is necessary, which is why Facebook banned Google from tapping into its members' social data.

But here's a little secret. All of this data is already leaking out in ways that Facebook and other social networks can hardly control. Startups are finding ways around their official APIs to get the data consumers want into their own systems. For instance, Zude, a personalized Webpage service, recently launched a feature called SocialMix that lets people import friends lists, photos, profile information, status updates, comments, and other data from Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, and hi5. (See the screen shot below, which shows my Facebook friends on Zude). "What we are doing is taking the information and normalizing it and making it available in any manner you want," claims Zude CTO Steve Repetti. He was tired of waiting around for true data portability to arrive, so he figured out a hack to offer it on his own (and it doesn't involve screen scraping).

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/18/AR2008051800093.html

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No surprise - for the most part, if the data is out there someone will find a way to get it.

[indimuse]

1. isn't facebook owned by Obama's close friend?

i don't mean this in a bad way...i thought i heard it somewhere?

[truedelphi]

2. The great equalizer is those who can hack into the systems that

Some people feel they have the right to own.

My congratulations and thanks are to Repetti of Zude.

[muryan]

3. Yes, whats this crazy concept of property

If I develop a website, what I'm really doing is saying I dont mind people stealing it from me.

[truedelphi]

5. With that I agree. I'm not into people stealing some individual's website

But should Rubert Murdoch own the information your teenagers post about themselves??

How about this - you are a writer. You notice other writers have websites. You notice that one web domain seems to provide a high capacity for large files and offers an easy way to develop the website that you want.

You put your writing on this free domain, after designing the website.

Then it turns out that everything you put up there is now actually the property of whoever it is that owns that domain. You agreed to it when you clicked on the "I agree" portion of the sign in.

All you thought that you were agreeing to was that you wouldn't do or say anything illegal. You didn't read the pages of small print. You just clicked "I agree."

[Ian David]

4. I trust "hackers" more than I trust Rupert Murdoch's MySpace. n/t