Google used to (c. 2005-2008) let you freely download your contacts & email from GMail, either as a file or an API. Facebook used this to seed Facebook. When

Google used to (c. 2005-2008) let you freely download your contacts & email from GMail, either as a file or an API. Facebook used this to seed Facebook. When you signed up with an @gmail.com account for Facebook, it'd prompt you to import all your contacts, and then send them all an e-mail inviting them to sign up for Facebook. Google's requests for some reciprocity from Facebook, where users would own their own social graph through technologies like OpenSocial, naturally fell on deaf ears. Google walled off their own platform and decided to abandon open standards for proprietary systems a couple years later, and this is a large reason why we can't have nice things. I believe GDPR enforces the ability to download all your data and both Google and Facebook offer it, but it's practically useless now. GDPR also makes the regulatory burden of starting a new social network impractical, so it's not like we could get an ecosystem of interoperable competitors.