The open web lost a battle today. | Hacker News Reader

The open web lost a battle today.

kara.allthingsd.com

18 pointsgenieyclo11 comments

The topic is newsworthy but I don't think you should be editorializing it via the title.

I agree with this sentiment. Remove the emotional content of your title in the future, it makes for less precipitous and more grounded posts.

Thanks all, will remember this in the future.

Indeed. From the guidelines,

You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it.

How is this a loss for an open web exactly?

Does Facebook let you export your data? No.

Is Facebook a private company? Yes.

Does it sell data to advertisers? Yes.

So my question is, now that the number 2 and 3 most-visited sites on the Internet are sharing this data, how is this _not_ a loss for an open web?

Maybe Yahoo will export it out the back door to users through an API before Facebook notices?

Yahoo pipes perhaps?

Seems unlikely, but at least the data's not all as much in control of only one company now. Two is hardly a whole lot better when it should be the users themselves, but it's not really worse than before.

So where the OP says it's not a loss and you say it is, I say this has no impact.

You can export personal data from facebook via api. It is doable by writing a desktop application to backup all your facebook personal data.

But for interactions between users such as comment, shared photos. that may be a murky area. Technically you are able to export share data. But morally you should not.

Is there such an application that backs up Facebook data? I hate the thought of losing years of comments, photos, statuses etc.

The fact that this is newsworthy is the problem. This data should be available via open APIs. It shouldn't take a licensing agreement negotiated by lawyers for stuff like this to happen.

Facebook Connect is not an open technology in any meaningful sense of the word.

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