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This was the graph api that enabled companies like Zynga to grow virally.

You used to be able to do searches on Facebook like "photos taken by friends of _____" and you could easily stalk them without being friends with them. Today that search will yield photos only if you are friends with them, or they enabled their privacy settings to public.

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Graph API and Graph Search were different. The latter was never exposed via a public API.

Neither exposed data that wasn’t available from using the product normally. For example you could visit someone’s profile, see who their friends were, and then look at those friends’ photos.

To me the ugly piece of this is that companies like Zynga really operate in the realm of addiction. So, Facebook is operating as a sort of addictive drug on steroids.

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