Openness also doesn't mean being a sucker. Share and share-alike provides an optimal solution to the iterated prisoner's dilemma of openness.
They're stuck in a continuous defect!
Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”
21–30 of 69 posts
Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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= ; is the user's profile, and http://graph.facebook.com/ ; 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…
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.
Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”
#23A person has no more right to mass export all of her friends’ private email addresses than she does to mass export all of her friends’ private photo albums.
Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends.
Not really, exporting your address book is the exact same thing as exporting a list of your friends' email addresses.
He had good points against Google, though.
Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”
#24Would anybody like to actually read the words, understand them, and engage with the argument they contain, rather than snark about how FB == teh hatez? The meat of it is: "Each person owns her friends list, but not her friends’ information. A person has no more right to mass export all of her friends’ private email addresses than she does to mass export all of her friends’ private photo albums. Email is different fro…
I'm trying to find a way to figure out how this line of reasoning wouldn't also apply to arguing that facebook shouldn't exist at all, and I'm not having much luck.
Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”
#25The most important principle for Facebook is that every person owns and controls her information.
Sounds very noble but I suspect this is far from Facebook's "most important principle."
Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”
#26Man, I can't believe we have these huge discussions about some petty fights. We know both parties are talking crap to uphold their selfish positions, don't we?
Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”
#27Can a comment on the tech crunch blog by one of the Facebook engineers be taken as an official Facebook position?
Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”
#28I cannot think of a less appropriate organization to declare this exact criticism.
I don't get why people have such a problem with this. If Hitler says genocide is wrong, does the fact that it came from Hitler make it any less true.
The arguments put forth either stand on their own or they don't. The fact that they came from a Facebook engineer is irrelevant.
Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”
#29A person has no more right to mass export all of her friends’ private email addresses than she does to mass export all of her friends’ private photo albums. Email is different from social networking because in an email application, each person maintains and owns their own address book, whereas in a social network your friends maintain their information and you just maintain a list of friends. Not really, exporting yo…
I think the difference is that if you email someone, most everyone understands that you're giving the user your email address and permission to email you back unless you use a disposable email address. Contrast that "knowledge" with facebook email addresses. How many people are really aware of whether or not their email on facebook is public, friend of friend, friend, etc?
I suppose that's a separate usability and privacy concern than what we're discussing, but exporting data of friends just seems different to me than exporting contacts from Google. Janet may have exposed her email address and phone number to me on facebook by "friending" me, but she's really just an acquaintance I met through a friend and emailing or calling her is more intimate than either of us want. Conversely, Judy and I met through a work colleague and she wants to do lunch and talk about a startup so she asked for my email address. I now feel like I have permission to email her as well.
My argument doesn't sound convincing, even to myself, but I still feel like the two forms of interaction and communication come with different inherent understandings. I have ~130 friends on facebook all of whom I've met in person save a single contact. The one I haven't met I would and have emailed, but out of the others I'd say 20% are people that would be welcome to receiving an email from me and vice versa. Emailing the other 80% would feel like an encroachment on my part. That said, why would I never need to mass download or import facebook contact details? I've already added the people I am inclined to email into my Google contacts, because there has been a mutual and deliberate decision to exchange contact information.
Not sure where I'm going with this, thinking out loud perhaps. ;)
Edit: Typos...
Re: Facebook Slaps Google: “Openness Doesn’t Mean Being Open When It’s Convenient”
#30So their theory here is that when I add a friend on Facebook, I am really saying this: "I share some of my contact info with you, but only as long as we both use Facebook?"
That's a convenient notion if you happen to work for Big #3b5998. But I think almost anyone would agree that it's really two people making a connection, and Facebook is just the middleman.