donal's blog

Back in July 2008, Facebook added the ability to take content you published elsewhere on the Internet and make it available to your friends on Facebook. I really liked this design and made use of it despite the flakiness of Facebook's implementation. Yesterday, Facebook informed users that they were killing this feature on 22 November 2011. Websites killing off features is nothing new but I'm disappointed for a number of reasons...

1. Click on account in the bar above. 2. Click on "Account settings" (or just go to https://register.facebook.com/editaccount.php ) 3. look for the "Download your information" section. 4. click on "learn more" 5. click on "Download" 6. wait for the email from Facebook. 7. download the zip file with your data. 8. PROFIT!! Note: you can't download information by other people (including their email addresses). There are some workarounds but personally, I'm not that fussed about this limitation. Getting *my* data out of facebook is much more important. Thanks facebook! Took you a while but this makes me a little happier. :) original blog entry: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=434691727130 boot note: I was originally going to post this as a facebook status update but the length was too long (720 characters vs the 420 character limit). so now it's on my blog which will propagate to facebook... =)

There was a question on RTÉ's Questions and Answers programme this week regarding facebook and privacy on the Internet. The responses from the panel were not well informed - they confused the issue between privacy afforded to users of a service by the service provider and the issue of keeping your data private from the general public. The two issues are totally different and need to be addressed separately... How service providers can use the information you upload to their service is very important. We're all familiar with the tick boxes on marketing boxes letting you opt in or out of the ability for them to use your data to pass on to partners and 3rd parties (the majority of companies require you to opt out - default is opt in). Many online service providers use data from their users to improve the service and I personally do not have an issue with them doing this as long as they are transparent about how they are using it. With regards closing an account, it is reasonable ...

so Facebook have launched a redesigned interface for their site. Seems to have uncluttered some stuff and first impressions are good! The nicest feature I see is that you can now link your external blogs, photo galleries, etc to your activity stream. This is a killer feature and means that you can use multiple providers but have one central source for all your friends... now to see if it works! :) update @ 15:26: this feature doesn't appear to be working right now. I've logged a bug with Facebook and monitor. If it does pick up the new postings it will be a very nice feature! update @ 15:33: this actually isn't a new feature but appears to be around for some time. Unfortunately, I can't get this blog added but i was able to add my youtube profile. :) update @ 18:25 (06 aug 2008): seeing if facebook have fixed the issue on their end.