Facebook Now Allows You To “Download Your Information”
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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".
The biggest advantage Facebook has is that it has your data, being able to export it changes the game.
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.
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.
Everyone didn't move from MySpace to Facebook. Facebook pulled in many, many new people.
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 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.
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).
Somebody has always said something like this about some predecessor.
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'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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websi...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And that is nothing to sneeze at.
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.
All the more reason to use Diaspora or (X).
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.
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:
[ http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/04/21/facebook-removing-2... ]
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.
>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
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.
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.
[1] http://www.livestream.com/facebookinnovations/video?clipId=p...
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.
Having to copy-paste a link from email, or forward the email to the new network would be yet another barrier for a new user.
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.
A disingenuous response is usually designed as a full stop, rather than way to carry on a conversation.
If they're truly into the idea of promoting user-ownership of data, there will be more done to allow it (i.e. this will be first step).
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.
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.
Haters gonna hate, indeed.
Yes. In nearly every product, and the rest are on the way. www.dataliberation.org/
"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.
This policy is effective immediately.".
That would win me over.
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.
Here's the live stream if you don't want to take TC's word for it: http://apps.facebook.com/facebooklive/
If they do expose it via the graph API then that truly is a big deal :).
Which, as Zuckerberg seems to be saying, is a difficult task to balance indeed.
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.
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[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.
http://www.facebook.com/contact_importer/remove_uploads.php?...
As kt has already pointed out, it hasn't worked. To my knowledge it hasn't worked for weeks now. Facebook has made no mention of its status.
It's not a good solution.
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 say "back," presuming it's fixed.
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?
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 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.
Now, if only Facebook simplified it's process to delete an account...
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.
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.
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.
Who knows what will happen if there is a sequel? :D
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
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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.
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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.
Anything you can offer is appreciated!
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).
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).