Comment by ck2
16 years ago
I approve a warning 1000% - it's not like they are stopping you from exporting.
This will slow down my AOL-using friends who gave away all their contact info to Facebook and now I get pelted with spam from Facebook using my name and list of friends (and I don't even have a Facebook account).
Google has never spammed me or share my name and location, Facebook does it all the time, pick who's more evil.
http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/26/orkut-slows-hemorraging-to-...
Relevant quote from Google:
"Mass exportation of email is not standard on most social networks - when a user friends someone they don’t then expect that person to be easily able to send that contact information to a third party along with hundreds of other addresses with just one click"
Lets recap:
1. Users use data exporter en masse to abandon Orkut.
2. Google breaks the exporter. Supposedly a bug, coincidentally when people are actually now using it.
3. Google changes the exporter so emails are no longer included.
4. Google says social networks shouldn't be expected to allow mass email exportation.
5. 12 months pass
6. Google breaks the gmail exporter to Facebook. Social networks apparently are now expected export all e-mails. Press eats it up.
Look, I'm not arguing that email exporting should or shouldn't be allowed. I don't really want my friends giving my email to Farmville so they get a golden banana, but it's not the end of the world. What I don't get though, is people talking about this like Google is some godly force of good, championing the rights of users against the evil Facebook.
Please. Google is getting scared, and made a calculated (albeit hypocritical) business decision to try and slow down Facebook's growth. The rest of this is BS PR spin and Techcrunch sensationalism to fan the drama fires.
The GMail exporter is not broken, it just warns you.
> This will slow down my AOL-using friends who gave away all their contact info to Facebook and now I get pelted with spam ...
Right; there are practical usability problems with allowing willy-nilly access to your contact list. Some of your contacts have now given your email address to a company with which you never wanted to have a relationship.
Which is precisely Facebook's reasoning for not providing an API to download your friends' email addresses. Thanks for providing a concrete reminder of the legitimacy of this choice.
Right; there are practical usability problems with allowing willy-nilly access to your contact list. Some of your contacts have now given your email address to a company with which you never wanted to have a relationship.
This is a red herring. Facebook lets me choose whether my friends can give away literally anything else that's part of my Facebook presence to third party apps. In fact, there's a strong recommendation that I allow as much access to apps as possible, in the name of a "more social" experience. They let apps that I've never used spam me daily, I don't really get the sense that they care whether they force me into relationships with companies I have no interest in, as long as it happens within Facebook.
Why should I not get to decide whether to expose my e-mail address? If I want to, I'm allowed to set my e-mail address to "Everyone" visibility in my profile, literally the only thing I'm not allowed to do is expose it via the API.
That's a very deliberate choice, and maybe I'm a cynic, but it strikes me as mighty telling that the lack of API access to the e-mail part of the social graph is just about the only barrier in the way of Google being able to reconstitute the entire Gmail intersection of Facebook's social graph (Facebook UIDs don't suffice, because Google can't match these to e-mail addresses without the users explicitly doing so for them).
This makes the assumption you already have a relationship (an account) with Facebook. If you do not have an account with Facebook, you do not have this control. kmavm's post indicates that they do not have, nor do they want to have, such an account.
However, this wish has no effect on Facebook, they will continue to send him invites on the behalf of his friends, who uploaded his email address for him.
> Which is precisely Facebook's reasoning for not providing an API to download your friends' email addresses.
So why does it give it to Yahoo mail and Hotmail? Please answer that question.
Relevant link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1889378
They also give it to me too. I have a Samsung Galaxy S and it, out of the box, syncs with Facebook including e-mail addresses.
What is Facebook's reasoning, then, for providing an API to download complete friend lists, location, real names, and other data a user didn't wade through privacy settings to lock down?
Handing information to a company with which a user never wanted to have a relationship is bad when it results in spam-filled inboxes, which end users might notice and directly associate with FB's policies. As long as the potential abuse is hidden from the user's view, though, FB wholeheartedly endorses it.
Ummm...they are my contacts.
"Facebook's reasoning for not providing an API" is because they want to protect me from other Facebook type companies? Really?
...or is it that they don't want us moving our data to another social network?
Let's get real. Facebook can spin it however they want. We all know what's up!
...not to mention, a concrete reminder of the hypocrisy of Facebook's argument.
"Facebook - we protect your contacts, so unscrupulous websites can't spam them like we do."
1000% eh? So you hire 9 slaves to approve alongside you? Interesting. Are they on your contacts? Hmmmm?
Much much much more wiery when people give out their email password to any other service period. Plus why would you care if you can't get the info out of facebook? You already have it in gmail. I dunno, I feel like I dodged so many bullets by not using facebook.
Actually, it is like they stop you from exporting. Here's the message I get when I try to import my contacts into Faceboook:
Google did not return any of your contacts. You can still find your friends on Facebook by uploading a file of your Gmail contacts below.
... followed by instructions on how to download my gmail contacts to a file and re-upload them.
So it seems that Google's implementation of their "whining at you about their problems while you're just trying to get on with your life" page is broken.
The end result is that you cannot export your contacts from Gmail at the present.
Clicking on the link to the "trap" page and checking "Proceed with exporting this data" brings up a "Download my contact information" button. Clicking that gives me a csv file with all my Google contact information.
So I can certainly export my Google contact data. I don't have a Facebook account, so I don't know whether it can import it. But the data is there, in an easy to parse format.
You can export them just fine - they just aren't allowing a 3rd party site to automatically import them - they're making you consciously do it yourself.
To someone who can do it either way, this may just seem like an annoyance, but a great many people won't grasp the severity of what they are about to do by handing their credentials for gmail over to facebook.
Exactly. One week ago, you could seamlessly import them into Facebook.
We're all here because we build web apps for a living. And none of us would ever consider doing something like that with one of our own sites. I have no idea why anybody at Google thought that this was a good idea.
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