The Argument For Facebook's Changes That No One Is Taking

For the past few days, the Internet and blogsphere community has been abuzz about the changes that Facebook announced regarding their development platform as it relates to accessing a user’s phone numbers and address from their profile.

While I am fully in favor of the blow-black when it comes to preventing fly-by-night applications from accessing this information that they have no need to, especially for marketing purposes, there is a flip-side to this argument that I am surprised no one has taken into account.

That is one of Data Portability and Portable Contacts.

Believe it or not, but there actually is a need for applications to have access to this information, but they are the applications that we want- online address books and cloud CRMs.

Imagine how much simpler your address book would be if you were able to access all of your Facebook friend’s profile information from even one of these services:

• Funambol
• Plaxo
• Gist
• Soocial
• Dub
• Cyncz
• Raindrop
• Mozilla Contacts
• Outlook
• Xobni
• LinkedIn

It’s not like this level of access in unprecedented. One only has to look at your Microsoft Live/Hotmail address book to see that the relationship capability does exist, within reason. Hotmail gives its users the ability to import not just the Facebook email addresses, but also their physical address and their phone number (yes, it’s true). Don’t believe me? Just go into Hotmail and link the two accounts, then go to edit a contact in both. You’ll be surprised what you’ll see.

Remember that our Facebook friends are also OUR CONTACTS.

When Facebook launched their DataPortability initiative to allow us to export all our status updates, photos, links, etc..., we said it was a good first step, but we also argued there needed to be more. We claimed that there still wasn’t a way for us to take our friends with us if we wanted to leave Facebook, or back up the information they have chosen to give us access to if Facebook ever decided to go down. Here, now, they are trying to give developers the opportunity to let us do just that, and how do we respond, with a slap in their face.

OK, so maybe this was not their reason for implementing this particular feature, but it’s the glass half full way that I am choosing to look at it, so please, stay with me.

After all our complaints, t is possible to view that Facebook is FINALLY taking steps to recognize that they need to open up their platform, and allow us to pull out this information. Regretfully, just like they have done time and again, they potentially had good intentions, just not the right implementation.

I hope, now that they have seen the error of their ways, that Facebook communicates with the Portable Contacts initiative (http://portablecontacts.net/) and together, they can forge a way to implement this functionality the RIGHT way- so that only the legit applications can access it, for the right reasons. Then, and only then, can everyone win.