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A case where security by obscurity ensures the future of the product, for now. I guess this is similar to Facebook / g+ / etc refusing to have easily imported
by timje1 13y ago
A case where security by obscurity ensures the future of the product, for now.
I guess this is similar to Facebook / g+ / etc refusing to have easily imported / exported data - if you can export your data to a useful format, you can move it to a rival product.
- Jean-Philipe 13y agoHas it ever happened that people moved to a rival product due to open formats?
- testrun 13y agoMail springs to mind, quiet a few people moved from different smtp/imap hosts to others.
- Scarblac 13y agoFacebook isn't about data, it's about friends. Most people move to a rival product once many of their friends have done so.
- timje1 13y agoFacebook doesn't have, and won't ever add, an 'export my photo albums, messages and friends list as a series of easily parsable xml files' button, because that would be building redundancy into the product. One of the ways that it locks you in is to to secure all this data, all this work that you've done. The fact that your friends all use it is obviously another significant factor. Similarly, I CBA to switch from Spotify, because I've got all of my playlists saved in it. If I moved to google play or one of the other up and coming music services, I'd have to rebuild these manually. There are some scraping tools to get this data out but they tend to be painful - "Just right click on each song and click 'copy HTML link'" etc ...
- gateaumoisi 13y agofacebook also removed rss support for their webpage
- opminion 13y agoIs CBA = cannot be bothered, or "arsed"? This is the first time I see an acronym used as a verb.
- spartas 13y agoActually Facebook has, and has had for the past few years, a "Download your data" option within the "Account Settings" page. That system collects your posts, messages, friend list, events, photos, and albums into one zip file. The structure isn't terrible (HTML), but it changed fairly often.