Facebook Unfriends Third-Party Friend Exporter

• http://networkedblogs.com/k1Z0z

Open-source software engineer Mohamed Mansour developed Chrome extension Facebook Friend Exporter to allow Facebook users to easily import all of their friend data into other applications, like Google Plus, but, as reported by ZDNet’s Friending Facebook blog and CNET’s DeepTech, the extension is being blocked by the leading social network. Facebook Friend Exporter was not developed specifically for Google Plus. According to CNET, the extension works by allowing users of the social network to save their contacts’ email addresses, birthdays, phone numbers, and other information as text files, or to import them directly into Gmail, simplifying the process of rebuilding a contact network.

— All Facebook

• Here we see Facebook reacting to the data leaching by removing email from the profile API. That might be a good thing:

Facebook is trying so hard to not allow you to export your friends. They started to remove emails of your friends from your profile by today, July 5, 2011. It will no longer work for many people. New version with a different design is currently deploying. ... This is what happens when your extension becomes famous : sigh. Facebook just removed the emails from their mobile site. They implemented a throttling mechanism that if you visit your ~5 friends in a short period of time, it will remove the email field. No worries, a new version is on the making … I am bloody annoyed now, because this proves that Facebook owns every user’s data on Facebook. You don’t own anything! If I were you, I would riot this to the media outlets again. ... Facebook is actually hiding data (email) from you to see when your friends explicitly shared that to you. Making it really hard to scrape because the only missing data is your emails, and that is your friends identity. Nothing else is.

— Mohamed Mansour