TECHCRUNCH
02 JULY 08
There’s one thing about Facebook
that most people still seem to have wrong: that it’s a walled garden. Quite the contrary, the Platform allows for full data portability and has since its inception. It actually isn’t a walled garden at all.
The problem is that this knowledge is buried deep within the FB documentation, a place few developers have wandered. For whatever strange reason, legal documents are like amusement parks for me, so I’m now fairly well acquainted with the ins and outs of porting data (and users) out of FB. So that’s what this whole post is about: To show you how it’s done.
Background
Once we got our heads around the Platform back in October, 2007, we hacked together FriendCSV as a demonstration. This is an app that allows you to export your full social graph (and all friend data) to your hard drive. This is all done in accordance with FB policies. After people got comfortable with this, we took it a step further by allowing users instantly port their own personal data into bigsight to create a new profile and account. Test out our importer here.
Why Facebook and the Platform are important
We believe FB is architecting the next version of the web. This is a bold claim – no doubt — but here’s the thinking: