[Daniel14]

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?

[kmavm]

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

...and whatever apps your friends have authorized.

[ja2ke]

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.

[Daniel14]

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.