[kwlug-disc] Scraping Facebook

[Paul Nijjar]

At the Doctorow talk yesterday, somebody asked an astute question
about network effects. She was not on Facebook, but all of her friends
were, and she was finding it harder to resist its creepy tendrils. 
But she wanted a non-creepy Facebook experience (which Doctorow
suggested was possible). What would the transition from Facebook to
something non-creepy look like, given that all her friends were on
Facebook now?

Doctorow suggested that the woman write a program that would scrape
Facebook's content and present it to end users. Then those end users
could apply their own filters and algorithms to the content in
non-creepy ways. This software would be a bridge in the sense that
posts to this abstraction layer would be fed back to Facebook. 

I am not seeing how this could work. Facebook controls the data on its
servers, and it permits access to its API via keys. It decides who
gets to access its data and for what purposes. If some subversive
startup tried to scrape its data, wouldn't it just shut down that
startup by locking it out of its API? If end users were the ones
logging into Facebook and running this app (so the end users were
authenticating, not the app) then wouldn't Facebook be able to lock
the end users out? That would be an effective way of killing the
startup right quick. 

I am guessing that such a service would be against the Facebook Terms
of Service in any case. 

Facebook does have a way to back up your data. That could be used as
an input to this program. But as far as I know this process is not
automated (surprise, surprise), and it is not that helpful. 

In short, I am not seeing how this idea could work. But maybe I am
being dumb again. Maybe such clients already exist? How well does
Facebook support cross-posting to other social networks?

- Paul

-- 
http://pnijjar.freeshell.org