Google Plus is starting to pick up buzz and is rising to the surface of the Internet zeitgeist in a way that Google Buzz never did. While it is still early days, Google Plus is already up to 10 million users while still being invitation only.
As Plus continues to grow, the challenge for people who decide to ditch Facebook is how to quickly get their friend data out of Facebook and into Plus. As a result several programmers have put together tools to automatically export friend data out of Facebook.
Needless to say, Facebook doesn't want to make it easy for you to pull such data. It has blocked two such exporting tools, under the guise of (get ready to laugh) protecting its users.
"The people who use Facebook expect us to protect the information they share with us, and prevent phishing, malware and scraping whenever possible. We are always reviewing and revising our user protections, and when we come across Platform integrations which violate our terms, we respond quickly," the company said in a statement.
Interesting - the company notorious for constantly changing its privacy settings to expose user data to the world is suddenly concerned for its users. Also interesting is that if you have a Yahoo account you can easily export such data, so Facebook can't be all that concerned.
The idea of exporting contact information from Facebook does raise a challenging question - is your freind's contact information yours (as in an address book) or theirs (part of their profile on a service?)
