Go Get Em Dave
Dave Winer points out that Facebook sucks. His reason, and I totally agree, is that Facebook, among other things, doesn’t give us easy access to our Address Book. It doesn’t give us a copy. It doesn’t let us manipulate or change it. It’s our data, that we’ve collected, and we can’t have access to it our way.
I’m someone who uses Facebook to reach people, to build relationships in another dimension than standard email, but it really does piss me off that I can’t organize my data my way. Sound like why we have things like RSS? It is. So we can take our data, put it where we want it, and use it in different ways. No wonder Dave doesn’t like how Facebook treats its user data. He’s a pioneer and evangelist for RSS.
With the growing complexity of social media and social networks, and with a strong need to be able to cut through the clutter, organize things my own way, and make MEANINGFUL correlation of information from my various networks, I applaud Dave for pointing out this annoyance.
Facebook does what it does, and there are tons of people using it, but that doesn’t mean it’s working just right yet.
Go get ‘em, Dave.
Photo credit, Josh Bancroft (who’s on sabbatical).
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Comments
Great post. Way to go Dave!
Facebook is mainly pissing me off because of the endless silly apps and the lack of RSS. Especially the lack of RSS.
sigh
Dave
I don’t know what all the huff is about. I can access my facebook address on my mobile using sms and\or internet. Just add the facebook mobile application……
Well in the early early early days of Facebook you were able to export a CSV of your contacts. I used this to populate my Gmail address book. Very handy. I wanted to do it again a few months later and discovered that this feature was removed within a month or so of May 05* because it was being abused by spammers/spambots.
So, it’s not like they didn’t think of this. I frankly don’t mind using their portal and accept this as a way they protect my information, just like they use a JPG of my email address now rather than plaintext. But would I complain if they reintroduced something like export functionality with some CAPTCHAs and better security, no.
*based on the email exchange I had with them, wanting them to give me back this function