[kmavm]

Would anybody like to actually read the words, understand them, and engage with the argument they contain, rather than snark about how FB == teh hatez? The meat of it is:

"Each person owns her friends list, but not her friends’ information. A person has no more right to mass export all of her friends’ private email addresses than she does to mass export all of her friends’ private photo albums.

Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends. Because of this, we think it makes sense for email applications to export email addresses and for social networks to export friend lists.

Facebook Platform and the Graph API enable everyone to bring their own information to millions of sites and applications, including even Google’s YouTube."

[krschultz]

He is talking out of both sides of his mouth though.

If Facebook exports a list of friends, what do you get? A list of names with no links? That isn't really useful. You either need email addresses or Facebook profile URLs to actually make a graph. What if your list is Billy Bob, Joe Smith, John Doe, and Mike Collins. How many of those are there are facebook? Dozens? Hundreds? It is meaningless.

If Facebook exports a list of all of the friends' Facebook profile URLs, that is a step in the right direction.

[kmavm]

The graph API provides exactly what you are asking for. It doesn't provide friends' names, but FBIDs. http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=<id>; is the user's profile, and http://graph.facebook.com/<id>; is the public JSON for that ID. If you have an access token (on behalf of a logged in user), the graph API will also let you see other information for the user that you are entitled to see.

Have you ever used a Facebook Connect site, like Google's YouTube? Have you noticed you can find your friends on the site? This works because the service gets FBIDs of both logged in users and friends.

[ddlatham]

The problem is FBIDs are not independent of your social network provider, in this case, Facebook.

If I want to take my social data from Provider A, I want it in an independent format, so that I can do whatever I want with it. So that I can back it up, and later import it to some other Provider. If there were some social networking standard for friends list independent of any provider, then great, use that, and skip the private email addresses. For now, email addresses are the best online standard for identifying my friends, independent of social network Provider. Names, or FBIDs are not.

[patrickaljord]

Why don't you provide that in your dump?

[shadowflit]

Sure, why not.

> Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends.

1) People are automatically added to my address book as soon as they email me. Maybe not my "personal" address book or whatever, but their address has been recorded regardless. This is not something I have to maintain, it happens as soon as you contact me.

2) If I change my primary email address I need to send out a blast mail to everyone who I might care to have my new address. A pain in the ass. I'd much prefer to have contact information pushed to me through, say, existing networks.

I honestly don't see a difference. I look at my address book as a "friends list" as well - just an annoying one that I need to keep up to date, instead of allowing my contacts to update as they need to. And if someone doesn't want me to have their contact information, why would we be friends in the first place? (I suppose you could fence off access to a select group, but really)

[quaesitum]

Facebook is being completely two-faced about this. They're obfuscating the situation by turning this into a matter of "Google-owns-mail," whereas "Facebook-owns-contacts". In other words, Facebook's stance is that users own contacts in Facebook, meanwhile users own email addresses in Gmail. The truth is: all this really boils down to is email addresses and nothing else. If you said, "No duh!" to that last sentence and you're still siding with Facebook, re-read that last sentence again and think about it. Let me explain.

According to Facebook: Facebook can get email addresses from Google, but Google cannot get email addresses from Facebook.

Huh, does this sound fair?

I see the gears in your are head turning, stop thinking about this as a matter of "Gmail users own email" vs "Facebook users own contact lists."

That Facebook argument is fallacious because it's a lot like saying, "If Google were to deal drugs, it'd be okay for Facebook to acquire said drugs from Google. On the other hand, it would be oh-so-bad for society if Facebook were to sell drugs, when they're actually in the matchmaking business." Whether or not it's morally reprehensible to distribute drugs, at least one's stance on the matter should be consistent. Don't insult a user's intelligence by turning this into a matter of business and occupation, which is what they're doing. This is a matter of email-contacts between parties A and B, and nothing more.

I don't think Google is as open as they COULD be, but they have a long history of doing a helluva lot better job than Facebook.

[msg]

As I said to you earlier, why can't I, the user, download whatever data my friends make available to me, subject to whatever privacy controls the data is already under and (perhaps) to load restrictions or resource availability?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1887085

And this is the important point, I could do the same thing manually by visiting my friends' pages. So this is all about convenience for the customer, not about some crusading policy position.

If my friends don't want me to "mass export" "private" email addresses, they shouldn't leave them out where I can cut and paste them (and sell to 419 scammers, if I were the vengeful type). The same argument applies to all my friends' data.

[extension]

That is a really fine line they are drawing there. You have access to the same information on both services and you acquire it in essentially the same way i.e. by the other party volunteering it. Facebook is effectively asserting that their users rely on the fine details of how the service works to maintain their privacy, even though Facebook has never had much regard for that principle themselves.

He is right about the "when it's convenient" thing though. If you want to adhere to a moral standard then great, do it, consistently. What other parties do is irrelevant.

And corporations morally crusading against each other is a complete joke. Corporations will slit your throat for a nickel. My stomach is not looking forward to the "who's less evil" war Google has started.

[patrickaljord]

> Because of this, we think it makes sense for email applications to export email addresses and for social networks to export friend lists.

But a list of friends is useless without their emails or at least, their facebook ID which the dump doesn't give. Why can't you give a hash version of their friend's email?

Also, if I'm able to import emails from gmail or yahoo into facebook, I should be at least allowed to export those friends emails as it is proven that I already have them! If you allow users to import emails but you don't allow them to export those same emails, I'm sorry but that means Facebook is a closed silo.

[qjz]

Here's my problem: Since when is my email address your information? Why is it okay for you to hand it over to a complete stranger, just so you can play Farmville? I understand that there's always a risk that my email address might become public, but when the recipient is responsible, it's a violation of trust.

[joe_the_user]

Yes, let engage with this position. I claim it's conniving double-talk: "Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends. Because of this, we think it makes sense for email applications to export email addresses and for social networks to export friend lists."

Hmm, so the (arguable) implication first is that an email address are more personal than a friend-name. They're more like photos, somehow. So sharing these is a more personal thing than just sharing the name of a friend. But then, email program should still export email addresses? (why, 'cause it's an "email program"!) I suppose then, a photo sharing program should allow you to export your friends' photos where-ever too??

The whole idea of what's appropriate to share is ill-defined and nebulous but this particular effort to draw a line is just a hoot... "Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana"

[InclinedPlane]

I'm trying to find a way to figure out how this line of reasoning wouldn't also apply to arguing that facebook shouldn't exist at all, and I'm not having much luck.

[yanw]

A friend won't care that you have their email address it's sorta expected, and one could also argue about whether an email address is even private information.

Or maybe Facebook could allow the export of some other friend identifier.

[Zaak]

If email addresses were rarely abused, then a private email address would be like an unlisted phone number.

Email address abuse is extremely common however, so public should not be the default.

[yanw]

But in this case emails are not being used to compile a list for spammers but to help someone find/invite their finding onto a new platform.

[kmavm]

Again, Facebook exports a unique identifier for each friend already, and has been doing so for years. This is the entire point of Facebook Connect.

[joe_the_user]

Indeed,

If, for example, you used the email of your friend to email them, you would have the address in your email program...

So Facebook is saying that it's OK that you could take the email address and put it in your email program and address book - but that automatically doing so is "just crossing the line"...