Wednesday, December 23, 2009

screw you, facebook

I use facebook. It's handy. The interface is very clean and usually pretty responsive, and I like the way it presents a stream of online social interaction between people. But what I don't like is their "tactics" to deal with people who try to interface with the site.

Recently I wanted to try and scape my own facebook profile for my friends' information so I could aggregate it and view it on my own terms. If your facebook was suddenly gone, wouldn't you want links back to your previous friends or contact information to get ahold of them again? A link to one such perl script here shows the typical response of Facebook to anyone who writes such a script. It was even removed from the Wayback Machine at archive.org, even though the rest of the site from when the script existed is still there.

Another site here details how a developer had his profile disabled due to trying to export his friends' contact information for an app he develops. It's not unusual to see an application log into a service and extract e-mail addresses so you can find the same people on a different service. However, getting your account dropped because of it is annoying to say the least.

At least there's some content out there that hasn't been taken down. This blog post shows how to log in and update your status. Hopefully this will get me close to a workable script; i'll have to create a fake profile to avoid my normal one being "deactivated", though.

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