[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?