Microsoft invites: Pull your address data out of FB
Uno as Online
Mar|26|2008
The Facebook/MS Messenger product allows you to pull your contacts email address’s out of Facebook and displays the addresses in plain text, ready for scraping.
Now this might not seem like too big a deal - but remember that of all the things that you can’t get out of Facebook (their API is quite extensive) the email address is the one that’s obscured. Essentially this means that you can’t map your friends in Facebook to friends on another service - which means Facebook is giving lip-service to dataportability.
However, if you were in a good position with Facebook, say if you were Microsoft, and say, if you were recently involved in quite a big business deal, you might be able to say “Hey, give us that data”.
Which would then give you a screen like the one below:
So why is this important?
No other company is allowed to do this except Microsoft, and it’s not possible to do this without some kind of screen scraper. Obviously, if you are in bed with them you are allowed to.
Services like Outsync would have a field day with this data, but similarly, data miners could too.
But still it doesn’t do what I want it to do - I want it to show me who of my friends are already on MSN!
The last step is still a pretty idiotic mailer:
Ideally, this would have mapped to your service already, added the contacts and there you go. But I’m just idealistic.
