http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/01/facebook-app-brings-back-data/...
People who are in despair about Facebook’s recent removal of personal information from their profiles can dry their tears. There’s an app to get it back. The social-networking juggernaut has been removing freestyle prose that users had added to their profiles about favorite activities, interests, music, books, movies and TV shows — sometimes painstakingly over years — and putting in its place links to related public pages. The change, decried by some as a blow to both free expression and privacy, will help Facebook bring to life an “open graph” that connects Facebook users to people, places and things across the Web and its related, controversial plan for “instant personalization” of partner Web sites. Luckily, it turns out the removed data has not been deleted from Facebook’s servers, just made unreachable by the new profile interface. And it can be salvaged using a little-known app, created earlier this year by an art professor, called Give Me My Data. The app is “making hackers out of regular users,” says the developer, Owen Mundy, an assistant professor in Florida State University’s art department. And it’s giving them a way to exercise ownership rights over their data. (After all, Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities says users “own all of the content and information [they] post on Facebook.”) Prof. Mundy says he wrote the app just for himself to gather his own Facebook friend data so he could use it make digital visualizations. Later, he decided to make the app publicly available and expand the types of Facebook data the app could retrieve so that anyone could use it to export their Facebook data, whether to make art or to just to have a personal copy. Only a handful of people were using the app, but “this week it kind of exploded because of the interface changes” by Facebook, he says. Traffic to the app’s page is now more than 2,000 visitors a day, and the app has more than 1,100 users, as people discovered it could retrieve their lost information. Contrary to the hopes of many people who have tried the app, it cannot “fix” profiles by returning them to their earlier state, he says. What it can do is let users gather and export their information in formats including TXT, CSV, and XML, which they can use as they see fit – including re-entering it into parts of their profile that are still free-expression zones. 
Facebook App Brings Back Data
By RIVA RICHMOND Related Posts
via swanksalot
This is really nice and great but informative blog
ReplyDelete