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Facebook Implements 'Download Your Profile' Option
eldavojohn writes "Facebook is rolling out some new changes (including groups) that are supposed to liberate user control. But something that might interest Slashdot readers even more is that they now allow you to download all your information from Facebook. That's everything — all your posts, pictures, videos, friend lists, etc. A video from David of the Open Source team at Facebook explains how it will work, although I don't see that option on my profile yet (they are slowly rolling it out). There's not a lot of details yet, but they at least require you to click a link from an e-mail and reenter your password to get this (to avoid spambots harvesting everyone's data and careless use of public computers resulting in data leaks). Perhaps competitors like Diaspora would be interested in using this base information to germinate user seeds?"
Even if diaspora dies, Appleseed is still around
http://www.drumbeat.org/project/appleseed-social-networking
Technoli
One thing that seems to be in the same update is removal of the "Clear Chat History" button in the chat window.
There are thousands of complaints posted about this already.
It doesn't take much imagination to see how not having this feature when one is expecting it can lead to comedy.
This is absolutely shocking. For the past few years it seems every article I have read has advocated that data be soley kept 'in the cloud' and that users will never need to download their data to a perosnal machine ever....
'The Cloud' is hype. Just like all the other hyped techs in the last 15 years (ATM will change networking, Java will be out OS, thin clients will rule the business world)
I? do think it will be interesting if real competition comes to FB how this will be used to transfer data.