Extension slurps Facebook contacts into Google+ The biggest challenge to making Google+ a viable competitor to Facebook is that people must reproduce their social graph--their collection of connections--at the new service.
But a Chrome extension makes that process a lot easier by automating the extraction of contact information that your Facebook contacts have shared. Facebook blocks Google Chrome extension for exporting friends. Who owns your social graph — you or Facebook? Facebook’s control over the information in your social graph is in the news again.
The company recently blocked a Google Chrome extension that scraped your contact info so that you could export it somewhere else, such as into Google’s new Google+ social network. The move has reignited debate over who exactly owns the information about your social graph — is it yours, or is it Facebook’s? Should you have the right to copy or move those email addresses wherever you want to, or is Facebook right to prevent you from doing so?
On Tuesday, after news broke about the Chrome extension being blocked, a Google engineer named Adam Lasnik wrote an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Google+ asking him to reconsider his views on allowing users to export their contact data, saying: Mark Zuckerberg, you seem like a good guy… so won’t you please let us (and third parties we explicitly authorize) access our own address books in FB without jumping through hoops? Clever Girl: Facebook Lets You Export Friends’ Email Addresses, But Makes It Opt-In. It’s now possible to export your Facebook social graph.
Your real social graph, complete with your friends’ emails, which means you can leave Facebook and import your social network into a rival site. But only if your friends opt into it. And they won’t. Facebook has quietly added a new feature to its Account Settings page, giving users the option to “Allow friends to include my email address in Download Your Information“.