In an article on his blog Tim O’Reilly argues that we should be table to easily export Facebook “social graph” data and move it between applications.
It is possible to use Facebook’s own application API to achieve this, however there are challenges:
- A 3rd-party application doesn’t know a lot about a user unless they’ve added the app
- One an app has been added by a user, it can see all that user’s details but they might not want to share everything with everybody
On adding an application a user is invited to select all the friends the user wishes to export.
These friends are invited to add the application. They may choose who is allowed to export their contact data and personal information. Privacy controls would exist to allow groups to see certain data when exporting.
The original user may then ask for an export in XML format (maybe a collection of vCards) of all the friends in the system. This format could then be used by other applications, and libraries developed to allow integration with other websites.
Invited users would also be able to export their data if they wish. This in time could be used to replace address books, and provide additional metadata that helps contextualise a relationship (school friend, business colleague, guy I met for lunch one, stalker, etc.)
Added by Paul Robinson 8 months ago, last updated 8 months ago by Ian Moss
Comments
Help me understand the intent behind the fourth paragraph. If some ego tries to export his or her graph via this application, what happens if some alters don’t, or won’t, also install the application? Does ego get no information about those people, or som
Basically, there are a couple of issue with this approach, so I’ve added a hint in the body – basically you need access to all the details but you then need to control access to those details.
The alternative would be to allow users to build up virtual business cards inside the application and decide who they give those cards out to.
By the way, there was a problem with the code so your reply got stripped down to a mere 255 characters. It’s fixed now, but sorry your reply got truncated! Feel free to post more answers.
Also, don’t forget all the ideas are editable – you can edit everything above. ;-)