Larry Page Calls Out Facebook For Lack Of Social Data Portability | Hacker News Reader

Larry Page Calls Out Facebook For Lack Of Social Data Portability

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Here's what Google had to say about the exact same product decision in their social network Orkut in 2009:

"Mass exportation of email is not standard on most social networks — when a user friends someone they don’t then expect that person to be easily able to send that contact information to a third party along with hundreds of other addresses with just one click."

http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/26/orkut-slows-hemorraging-to-...

Google was right then, and Facebook is right now. You have a right to download the data you put into Facebook, but not the data your friends put into Facebook: their photos, status updates, check-ins, and yes, contact information, are all technically readable to you, but this is information your friends have contributed, not you. Providing bulk download of other people's data would be widely abused, and lead some of the same critics of Facebook's "lack of openness" in this decision to complain about Facebook's "disregard for privacy" if it were reversed.

I work for, but don't speak for Facebook, just my opinion, etc.

Facebook itself lets you import your friends into Yahoo! mail. Can you please explain how this is consistent with your above post?

Again, emphasizing I'm not an official spokesperson here: but Yahoo! is a reputable company who is not going to sell your email contacts to spammers. The same cannot be said for every random application that gets created. So it's a whitelist, not a blacklist.

Why isn't Google on that whitelist? I don't really know, but I'd be curious what Google's side of that story is.

The question is not about APIs for apps; the issue is that a user cannot readily export their complete social graph from Facebook--specifically, in a way that allows them to rebuild it elsewhere in its entirety. It's trivial to easily provide that capability in a way that wouldn't expose it to apps. And obviously Facebook doesn't have an issue with sharing the data, because it's available through things like Yahoo email. However, nothing exists to make it easy for a user to retrieve it. And when something like a third-party browser extension provides the capability, Facebook seems to intentionally break it.

It seems the only reason for this is because Facebook wants to make it hard for users to leave, unless you know of some other explanation?

From the same quote: "Google Contacts syncs with Orkut, so users can export their Orkut friends’ email addresses from Google Contacts", so it's technically wrong that Google didn't let you export your friend's mail addresses anymore. They just made it more difficult, ie didn't bundle it with the Orkut csv file people used to import everything into facebook.

And I think that's actually Google's point: They feel Facebook should offer reciprocity; if people can switch from Google to fb easily, fb should be willing to provide the same feature to their users.

Personally, I also don't agree with your point: I doubt the option to export your friends' email addresses in a useful file format would get abused, as it's only your friends that have access to it. You willingly added them, and thus gave them access to your email address. If you voluntarily tell a friend your email address, shouldn't he be able to remember it regardless of what social network he currently uses?

> it's only your friends that have access to it.

...and whatever apps your friends have authorized.

I already feel rather uncomfortable about all the information apps can gather about me without me ever having to do anything. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't it be very easy to restrict that, and only let my friends have access to <i>my</i> personal data? I added my friends, I don't mind them having access to my data, including my email address. But apps my friends use are a very different matter.

Why would a clean, user focused "export my info" tool also be exposed to apps? I can't imagine a situation where those two features would be intrinsically tied. This is about an end-user-side button which dumps your friend network 'address book' into a simple machine readable format and downloads it to the users local drive. Implying such a feature would/could, accidentally/maliciously cause a user's contacts to flood out uncontrollably to 3rd party app developers reads like FUD.

That's a very disingenuous argument. The same statement you're citing clearly points out that "Google Contacts syncs with Orkut, so users can export their Orkut friends’ email addresses from Google Contacts," which is the only other piece you need to rebuild the social graph.

The funny twist on this is that Facebook never would have experienced such rapid growth had email providers like Gmail not allowed users to easily export their contact lists. So, it seems the lesson Facebook learned here is to deny any potential competition the same advantage that more open providers gave them--otherwise it would be too easy to abandon Facebook.

For the most part, I remember sites like Facebook asking you for your e-mail username and password, then logging in as you, and scraping the data out: I don't remember it being because "email providers like Gmail [] allowed users to easily export their contact lists".

I think you misunderstand what's occurring. Facebook wasn't "scraping" anything; Gmail provides a simple API and UX to allow users to export their information. In fact, Google called Facebook out for their lack of reciprocity in this area last year, and has experimented with blocking export directly to Facebook: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/11/google-facebook-data/

...and yet, I remember it being a serious issue that sites like Facebook were asking for users' usernames and passwords to other sites, the disclosure of which is a violation of the terms of service of even Gmail. I do not remember Facebook offering this service as "upload your contact information", at least during the time when they were growing to prominence (important for your argument).

I don't see how that's at all relevant. Yes, of course you need to be logged in to export your Gmail contacts, but none of that implies that they're being "scraped" or retrieved in anything other than a readily accessible form. The simple fact is that Google has supported this kind of contact export for several years. Facebook has long benefited from it, but explicitly prohibits anything comparable on their end (i.e. not providing it themselves and intentionally breaking browser extensions, apps, or any third-party connectors).

If you handed my website your Facebook username and password in the same way that users were handing Facebook their Gmail username and password, I could easily pull a list of all of your friends. The point here is that your insistence on quibbling over whether something is in a "readily accessible form" makes no sense in light of the mechanism that Facebook (and similar sites) were (and often still are) using to get your e-mail contacts: by logging in /as you/.

Seriously? You're actually trying to make this argument? Sorry, but it's not worth my time to debate this with someone so disastrously ignorant as to think he can scrape Facebook profiles without getting throttled, banned, blocked, and litigated to hell and back.

They should implement a data download request. "X is asking to download the personal information and posts your shared with him, do you want to allow it? Yes/No".

I agree with the notion that exporting a whole list of contacts and importing them into a different social network is bad (and annoying), but I don't think FB should prevent me from exporting my contact list. On the contrary, I think social networks should disallow importing a whole list of contacts.

Exporting is useful for a number of reasons (import into Thunderbird, for backup purposes, etc). Some people might abuse the feature but that will help bring people's expectations of digital privacy closer to reality.

You maintain that Gmail contact list. Your friends maintain their Facebook profiles. That's the difference.

Sorry, I rewrote my post.

For the record, I initially asked if it was ok for Gmail to allow me to export my contact list (using OP's reasoning). And I don't maintain my Gmail contact list. People email me and their contact info gets saved by Gmail.

One way to look at the current situation in social networks is that it is a rehash of the pre-Internet situation. Pre-Internet, some institutions already had internal networks with mail systems and so forth, but each network was an isolated island. The internet enabled people in different networks to talk with each other.

The social networks of today are isolated islands, and I would love to see a "social internet", in the sense of a suite of protocols that allows different social networks to be directly connected. I am thinking in the direction of Jabber for instant messaging and OpenID for authentication, i.e. some set of protocols that is truly aligned with the distributed philosophy of the original internet.

Unfortunately, the structure of financial rewards is not aligned with such a goal. I do hope that Google+ gets just enough momentum to force Facebook into cooperating on that front.

The OStatus[1] specification enables distributed operation of Twitter-like interactions (specifically, short status messages, @replies and direct messages), so there's that. The people who worked on that are working on a new revision[2] that presumably will try to address the use-cases of sites like Google+.

[1]: http://ostatus.org/about

[2]: https://plus.google.com/104323674441008487802/posts/it3iBLUj...

This is interesting and good info. I am of the mind that social networks that are privy to personal info should not be run by for-profit companies unless they are being paid directly by the users, not adverts. I'm not sure how widespread this belief is, but it is my belief, and I hope we can move things in that way.

For any new technology (here, the example is social media), there is a natural evolution from closed to open standards. Early on, lots of proprietary code is modified as quickly as possible to see what works well in practice. Some companies win, some lose. An industry group trying to decide what to put in a standard is pointless b/c it's all hypothetical what features will survive the test of time.

Eventually, however, an open standards organization should come in and say "these are the standard features, let's encapsulate them in an open standard that everyone uses." This has been proven to be a very healthy way to get to an open standard that really works well in practice.

In 2011, I believe social media is ready to move to an open standard. The last five to ten years has seen a lot of technology built and verified by trial and error. There certainly has been enough capital investment in social media systems. The basics of what Facebook and Twitter do are a very good start. Something like OStatus can define the basics of what social media is by looking at what really works, which would not have been possible even a few years ago.

This is why I'm disappointed in google+. The social media industry is at the point in it's life cycle that it can move to an open standard. Google was in a unique position to ram it through all at once. Instead, they decided to make yet another closed system with minor improvements over the existing competitors. They may win lots of users in the short term but a bigger shift to open standards is coming, but now we have to wait longer for it.

I too wish G+ were federated (or at least federable), and it's kind of sad that it's not... on the other hand, I've seen a number of Google employees making the right noises[1] about APIs and distributed operation, and reaching out to other social networks, so I'm still positive.

[1]: See this thread: https://plus.google.com/104323674441008487802/posts/1EzrmG9K...

In other news Mark Zuckerberg calls out Google for lack of search engine transparency.

Honestly, I think the lack of social graph portability on Facebook is a really good thing. Look how they messed up the Wall with these so-called social games. The day Zynga gets my social graph is the day I leave.

Google's posturing is really getting old. Maybe I'd take them more seriously if they didn't have their finger in every pie.

The day Zynga gets my social graph is the day I leave.

I strongly prefer to keep my social graph private, and reveal it only to people who are in it. However, Facebook declared social graphs public quite a while back:

"Now when you uncheck the 'Show my friends on my profile' option in the Friends box on your profile, your Friend List won't appear on your profile regardless of whether people are viewing it while logged into Facebook or logged out. This information is still publicly available, however, and can be accessed by applications." http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10413835-36.html#ixzz1SMg1...

So as I understood it, Zynga already has access to my social graph. But I'm not a Facebook privacy expert; I find the privacy rules confusing.

Would a "don't allow others to export my information" feature, maybe with some granularity, help with this? So if your friend dumped their info to leave, or sent it directly to another app or service, you wouldn't be included* since you opted out of allowing others to export you?

* or, with some granularity and tuning controls, maybe for example just your name and it's presence in photo tags from your friends library, and nothing else, would be included.

I'm very surprised that when you use Google Takeout it doesn't give you all the data that has been made available to you. For example, it doesn't export email addresses or phone numbers for people in your circles that you didn't explicitly put in your address book. Basically the same as Facebook's position on data export.

I want interoperability of social networks, not portability.

Being able to share info across social media services would change the way social networks are used in a significant way for every user, every day.

Portability is a backup plan you hope to never use.

Google+ doesn't export contact data either! It only produces contact information for people already in your Google address book. How has Google earned this "Holier than thou" attitude?

What you are claiming simply doesn't seem correct to me. I am too privacy conscious to simply use a tool so early in its release, but my understanding is that most data can be extracted from Google using google.com/takeout. I know I can export my Google Contacts quite easily, and I have done that before in order to sync with my home phone (i.e. ipod touch).

Google+ doesn't export email addresses that you don't already have access to--for example, if someone has you in a circle but you've never exchanged an email. That makes sense, because the export shouldn't violate the privacy restrictions enforced by the normal UI.

However, in you can't export an email address already connected to a profile (either through contacts import or because the user shares it via privacy settings). So, the point is that Facebook is impeding export in a way that does nothing to improve a user's privacy but does create obstacles to moving your information elsewhere.

We're only two weeks in and competition already turns out to be a good thing. I'm really hoping that Google releases an API soon because that's where I want to see changes: third-party social app development is quickly turning into a monoculture & we all know how bad that is.

...says the company that keeps their search engine ranking algorithms secret.

...says the company that does not even share how much % of their adsense revenue goes to advertisers.

In short: Both companies guard what they consider important for their success.

What does their lack of transparency have to do with portability? Google is accusing facebook of holding users' data hostage. Both facebook and Google keep lots of aspects of their business private for competitive advantage. Locking users in and intentionally making it as difficult as possible for them to try competitors is a crappy thing for facebook to do, and Google scores a legitimate advantage by doing the opposite.

Google do share the percentage of advertising revenue that they give to publishers: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.ht...

(It’s 68% for AdSense for content, and 51% for Adsense for search.)

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