Facebook adds ability to download your Facebook data

A few years ago I thought it would be really helpful to create a tool that would allow anyone to archive their Facebook account, just in case something happened to it. Think about it... 20 years from now, wouldn't it be interesting to see what was going on in your day-to-day life? And what if Facebook were to start charging fees to access your account or, Lord forbid, to disappear?

Last year we finally released the ArchiveFacebook Firefox add-on which allows you to save to your hard drive your Facebook account, just as it appears in your web browser.

My hope was that this tool would have a limited life span. I wanted it to nudge Facebook into providing a method to download and even transport user data to other social networks. Finally, it looks like Facebook has caved-in.

Coming soon, you will have the option to download a zip file from Facebook that contains all your wall posts, photos, messages, etc. You can browse the contents of the zip file in your browser.

The video below shows how this will work.



I have not yet been given access to the feature, but I will report back later once I've had a chance to use it. I'm not sure if it will be possible to upload the archived data into another social network. My guess is that someone will need to write a program that converts the zip file into an open format that can then be transported.

Thank you to Carlton Northern, Hany SalahEldeen, and others who have put a lot of time into making the numerous and painful modifications to keeping ArchiveFacebook working as Facebook made website changes. It may finally be time for it to retire.


Update on 10-20-2010

I was able to download my entire Facebook account today. It only took a few minutes after I requested the archive that Facebook made it available to me in a 6MB zip file. As you can see below, it's a spartan set of pages with all your Wall posts, photos, messages, etc.:



I scrolled down the very long Wall page and found my very first Wall post dated September 28, 2006 at 9:03 pm from my friend Stacey: "Welcome to the ridiculous! How's Bean? How are you?" According to the Facebook Wikipedia article, this was two days after Facebook had opened to the general public. I guess that makes me an early adopter (for once).

One technical problem I ran across: Facebook has mangled the image src attribute (src="../photos%2FProfile%20Pictures%2F514544861521.jpg" should be src="../photos/Profile%20Pictures/514544861521.jpg"), so I couldn't see my Photos in Firefox. I had no problem seeing them in Chrome.

A Dislike button for yourself

I've been playing with Facebook's new Like button which you can place on any of your web pages. When someone clicks on the Like button, it shows up in their Facebook account. All you have to do is insert an iframe into your webpage. Here's what my iframe looks like for my Harding home page:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.harding.edu%2Ffmccown%2F&layout=standard&show_faces=false&width=450&action=like&colorscheme=light&height=35" 
scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; 
overflow:hidden; width:450px; height:35px;" allowTransparency="true"></iframe>

It got me wondering though, what if someone wanted to dislike me? So I created a Dislike button and rigged up a little JavaScript to display a snarky message when someone clicks on the button. You can see it on my home page, right under the Like button.

If you'd like to make your own Dislike button, just follow these steps:

1. Place this image on your website:


2. Use the following HTML to display the Dislike button and a place-holder for some text:

   <a href="javascript:Dislike()"><img
   src="dislike.png" width="61" height="24"
   title="Click here to dislike this item" border="0" /></a>
   &nbsp;
   <span id="dislike_text" style="position:relative; top:-7px; 
   font-family:Tahoma; font-size:8pt;"></span>



3. Finally, insert this JavaScript function somewhere in your page which randomly chooses a message to display:
   

   function Dislike()
   {
      var responses = [
         "I'm not crazy about you either.",
         "Whatever.", "Seriously?", 
         "My feelings are so hurt.",
         "I'd rather be feared than liked.", 
         "Nice try."];
     
      // Get a random number between 0 and responses.length - 1 
      var num = Math.floor(Math.random() * responses.length);
      document.getElementById("dislike_text").innerHTML = responses[num];
   }

Note that this is only for fun, and it will not show up in Facebook.

If you are really interested in having a Dislike button that works in Facebook, check out this Firefox plug-in.

When Twitter is gone, your Tweets will live on

The Library of Congress announced on Wednesday that

"Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress."

That's right... every thoughtless, trivial, and crass remark you ever tweeted is now going to be made available for future generations (your tax money at work ).

This is actually a very positive development because this corpus of short messages will provide invaluable to researchers and historians. My guess is some research on this corpus will likely be used to improve web search. I will certainly have my web IR course in the spring do some analysis on the corpus.

My hope is that some day the LoC will also archive all of Facebook. This will prove much more problematic as Facebook data is inherently private, and access to the archive will likely need to be restricted. But losing this treasure chest of bytes would, in my estimation, be far more of a loss to society and future researchers than losing a few tweets.

Will the real Dr. Burks please stand up

Dr. Burks, president of Harding University, decided he needed to clarify something in chapel this morning. Apparently lots of people were befriending the wrong Dr. Burks on Facebook.

There are multiple Facebook accounts claiming to be Dr. Burks, and he showed a few screen shots of the impostors (the photo below is one of them). This is a problem because some students have been receiving messages from the fake Burks; one message asked someone to speak in chapel this week. (Sure is annoying when people create fake Facebook profiles.)



Dr. Burks showed everyone his correct profile and said he'd love to be everyone's friend. I have a feeling that he'll be receiving hundreds of friend requests today... that is if anyone can find the correct Dr. Burks. I did a search for "David Burks", "David B. Burks", and president@harding.edu (Dr. Burk's email address), and the only profile that looked legit was the one pictured above. I even looked through one of his son's list of friends on Facebook, and he wasn't listed there.

It looks like the fake Dr. Burks will continue racking up friends for a while.

Facebook: Memorialize the deceased

In a blog post on Monday, Facebook brought attention to a previously existing feature intended to "memorialize" Facebook users who have deceased. You can submit a "Deceased" form (pictured below) that notifies Facebook about "dead" accounts. Once Facebook determines that the account owner is indeed deceased and flips the switch, no one can log into the account anymore, and the person's face no longer appears in friend recommendations or Suggestions. However, you can still post message's on the departed's Wall.



The problem with memorializing the account is that the user's family or friends, if they had the user's password, can no longer access the user's Messages or other personal data. (This could be good or bad thing.) For anyone in this predicament, I highly recommend you archive the deceased's account using ArchiveFacebook before their account is memorialized. Then you will always have a snapshot of the person's Facebook account on your own hard drive.

I'm giving a talk about the ArchiveFacebook Firefox add-on tomorrow afternoon in a Harding University Computing Seminar. If you're in Arkansas Thurs, feel free to stop by at 4:00 pm in Science 113.

P.S. This issue of "what happens to my data now that I'm gone?" is going to continue being more relevant as more of our data is stored in the clouds.

Archive your Facebook account with ArchiveFacebook

It's finally here... a tool to archive your Facebook account. I've talked about the development of this tool in previous posts. It's a Firefox add-on called ArchiveFacebook which allows you to create a complete off-line, browseable archive of your Facebook account. ArchiveFacebook will archive your Wall, photos, messages... your entire life which has been recorded in Facebook.

You may not believe this, but Facebook will not always be around. Your Facebook account will not always be accessible. It's up to you to archive your data before it lands in the big bit-bucket in the sky.

Thanks to Carlton Northern who worked on this project for the past 6 months and to Michael Nelson who helped direct the development work.

Facebook - content is currently unavailable

Someone tagged me in a photo on Facebook yesterday, but when I click on the link I received in my email, I get the very "helpful" error message:

This content is currently unavailable

The page you requested cannot be displayed right now. It may be temporarily unavailable, the link you clicked on may have expired, or you may not have permission to view this page.

If the page is temporarily unavailable, I should try again and again and again to access it. But if the link has expired, I am wasting my time trying to access it again and again. And if I don't have permissions, how do I get it? There's no helpful tip given as to how to get permission to view the image.

Surely Facebook could tell me which of these is the true problem and suggest what I do next.

I would qualify this as a variation of GUI blooper #28.

Power.com: Give me your Facebook data!

TechCrunch is reporting that Power.com is suing Facebook over their lack of data portability. Power.com is a service which allows you to aggregate your various social networks into a single location, but Facebook's data, as indicated in their Terms of Service, is still off-limits to them. Disregarding the restrictions, Power.com tried using the Facebook API and screen-scraping to get their data until being sued earlier in the year by Facebook.

This is exactly what I've been working on (with a graduate student at ODU) for the last few months. But I'm doing this to preserve the data, not necessarily to aggregate it along with other social networks. However, there's no reason why a preserved Facebook account could not be uploaded into another service.

My guess is my approach won't be looked at kindly by Facebook, but they'll probably leave me alone since I'm only providing a service for individuals to archive their account, and I'm not aggregating the data to my own server.

I'm at JCDL 2009 in Austin

JCDL 2009 is about to wrap up. It's been a good conference with some interesting presentations, and I've enjoyed catching up with old friends. The conference is being held on the UT campus... short on grass but big on buildings. I think the UT football stadium is more impressive than many NFL stadiums I've visited. I guess that's what happens when you win a few national championships.

I especially enjoyed the two panels. The first panel, What should we preserve from a born-digital world?, basically came to the conclusion that everything should be saved. I concur... disk space is cheap, and it's hard to know what will truly be valuable years from now. I also enjoyed hearing about Megan Winget's work in preserving games.

The second panel, Google as Library Redux, discussed the unfortunate conclusion of Google's lawsuit with publishers and authors, agreeing to a settlement instead of pressing the court to settle the bigger questions in regards to copyright, orphaned works, etc. One of the more provocative statements came from Michael Lesk who said JCDL was irrelevant because there were no attendees from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. We are being ignored. Ouch. But he may be right. I see plenty of guys from Google et al. at the WWW and SIGIR conferences.

I gave a couple of talks this year (see my slides below). There was a lot of interest particularly in my Facebook paper, What Happens When Facebook is Gone?, where I discuss the ramifications of having all our data locked-up in the walled garden of Facebook. Carlton Northern, a graduate student at ODU, is currently working on a Facebook archiving add-on for Firefox, and hopefully it will be available soon.




My second paper, A Framework for Describing Web Repositories, is work pulled from my dissertation. In it I discuss how we can view web repositories (everything from a search engine cache to a web archive) in a more abstract manor. I propose some new terminology and an API that web repositories could/should implement to be helpful to clients accessing the repository's contents.




Tomorrow I'll be co-hosting a the InDP 2009 workshop. It's an all-day event, and I'll be flying home late tomorrow night. It'll be good to be back with the family.

Micah Pate has been found

If you haven't already heard, Micah Pate's body has been found. Micah's husband Thomas is being charged with the killing this morning.

Micah Rine Pate was a Harding University graduate and Searcy native. Her parents are employees of Harding and Harding Academy. As you can imagine, the Searcy community has been rocked with this story. Our prayers go out to the Rine family and to Thomas' family.

The photo on the right is a screen shot of Micah's Facebook page. Many of her friends are posting sad farewells to her and telling her family how much they loved her. Her account will likely remain active as long as Facebook is around. I imagine her family is going to "capture" her Facebook account as well as an artifact of remembrance. I'm presenting a paper on this subject in June at JCDL 2009.


Update:

Two vigils in Searcy were held for Micah and the Pates, one at Harding. KARK 4 News had a news story about it last night. One thing that comes across in the story and interviews is Micah's faith and the positive influence she has had on others.

Why is Facebook hiding network statistics?

A while back I compared the Harding University and Old Dominion University networks on Facebook. But in the last several months, I've noticed that the ability to view network statistics in Facebook seems to have been turned off. I can't seem to find any discussions on the Web about this issue, so either I'm the first one to write about it or I've been over-dosing on crazy pills.

Several months ago, you could see your network's statistics (% male/female, top interests, etc.) by clicking the "Network Statistics" link while browsing your network. The URL looked like this:

http://www.facebook.com/networks/16777927/Harding/

where the number is the network ID assigned by Facebook and Harding is the network's name. When I try to access this URL now, I am redirected to

http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?networks

which only allows me to view the networks I'm a part of or join a new one (pictured below).



The interesting thing is that when I searched Google for links to network statistics pages, they apparently have hundreds of them indexed and cached as shown below. But when you click on any of the links, you are routed back to the screen above, and when you click on a cached link, you are told your search "did not match any documents".



It doesn't look like the Internet Archive has any of these pages archived.

So is anyone else able to view their Facebook network statistics? And what would be their motivation for hiding this information?


Update later today:

Somehow I missed it... last May Facebook placed an announcement on all network pages:

Network Pages will be discontinued soon

I was able to view a number of cached network pages with Live Search. Although they didn't have Harding's page cached, they had a number of pages from various US cities. Below is a snapshot of Washington DC's page from 10/14/2008 which includes the warning:


Once Live attempts to re-crawl this page, it will disappear into the bit bucket in the sky. All the user comments will also disappear.

It's really a shame Facebook got rid of these pages as they provided an interesting summary of each network.

View my blog in Facebook

A few weeks ago I added my blog's feed to my Facebook Notes so it would automatically import each posting into Facebook's Notes application. It's easy to do, and it makes it convenient for friends who never leave the confines of Facebook to see what I'm up to.

I've only noticed a fews problems. One is that comments made on my blog aren't imported into Facebook and vice versa. It would be nice if Facebook would merge the two. Also if I embed a video in my blog post, Facebook won't include it in my Note. The last problem is speed: it sometimes takes several hours for my post to show up in Facebook. This is probably because it takes Blogger a while to update my feed and Facebook a while for it to check for changes.

Overall though I think this feature is a great idea.

Now that we can import our data into Facebook, how do we export our data out? I've just written a paper about this topic that is under review. Contact me if you'd like to know more about it.

Goodbye, my "friend"

I've been doing some research on Facebook which has required me to spend a lot more time than usual looking at my Wall and news feed. One friend appears there almost every time I look, and usually it's because he's posted something contentious, designed to provoke his "friends" into an argument. I'm really getting tired of seeing his posts.

So today I've decided to de-friend my first friend. Actually, we're not even true friends... I don't think I've even met the guy. So why do I feel so guilty about removing him? As Facebook warns me, this action is serious... it "cannot be undone."


BTW: A colleague of mine told me how he once removed someone from his list of Facebook friends. The de-friended had hundreds of friends, so how would she know? Turns out she had memorized the number of friends she had, and noticing that the number went down by 1, she scanned through her list of friends until she somehow noticed the one name that was no longer there! My buddy was busted!

Fav5

Classes start on Monday. Here's my pick of the week's top 5 items of interest before the storm begins:

1. Delete 10 of your Facebook friends for a free Whopper. No kidding.
   
   


2. There's an informative article in the NY Times about T.V. Raman and his work at Google to improve technology for the visually impaired. Raman is one of the architects behind AxsJAX, a Google technology to improve the accesibility of AJAX-based web applications. I met Raman a few years ago at the WWW conference in Banff, and I was impressed at how efficiently he seemed to use his computer with the aid of a screen reader.
   
   


3. Here's a reminder of the horrible costs of war and how crazy our world has become: the DOD wants to build an application to allow children to have conversations with their simulated mom or dad who is off to war. Not their actual parent, a simulated version of their parent.



4. Self-powering cyborg cockroaches. Nuff said.
   
   


5. This week I got back last semester's student evaluations. In general they were pretty good, but it's always the negative comments you remember most, even if they are totally unwarranted. A fellow faculty member tried to cheer me up: teachers that get the best evaluations are either hot or easy. Hmmm... was he trying to tell me I'm not very good-looking?
   

Facebook visualization: Sharing around the World

Allan pointed out this beautiful visualization that from Facebook showing the interactions of users around the world. Watch comets orbit the Earth as friends post messages, write on walls, and comment on photos. Very nice.

Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. A new version of iTunes is out, and it contains Genius, a feature which magically creates playlists for your songs. Apparently some people don't think the feature works that well. I've only had a few minutes to play with it and haven't formed an opinion yet. I do wonder why Apple would name such a feature "Genius", thus putting a clear target on its head when it doesn't perform perfectly.
   
   
2. ComputerWorld has a nice article summarizing Google's current dabble with enabling the masses to influence search results.
   
   
3. Google is expanding their digitization efforts to news archives.
   
   
4. Some researchers have built a "Facebot" application, a Facebook app which appears to be harmless but secretly performs a denial-of-service attack on an unsuspecting web server.
   
   
5. If you've never seen Pirates of Silicon Valley, you can view the entire made-for-TV movie on YouTube, at least for a little while. This entertaining movie from 1999 shows how a young Bill Gates and Steve Jobs transformed the computer world, mostly by stealing ideas. The acting may not always be stellar, but if you're interested in how Apple and Microsoft got their start, you'll love this movie.
   
   Jobs: "You're stealing from us!"
   Gates: "Steve, we're not stealing from you. So don't tell me that..."
   Jobs: "What are you doing then? What is this that I keep hearing about you developing this... what do you call it... Windows?... to compete with us?!"
   
   

Fav5

My pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Microsoft is helping researchers by providing new plugins to Microsoft Office. If you've ever used Word to write a thesis or journal article, you know what a mess it is. I hope these tools will help a little.
   
   
2. Three French journalists who work for Global Security Magazine were expelled from the Black Hat conference for allegedly sniffing the press room computer network. A little ironic that attendees can be kicked out for hacking at a conference that shares hacking info.
   
   
3. This morning I was given the chance to view the new Facebook interface. I give it two thumbs up for simplicity. I wonder though how they picked my Broncos fan box to appear on the first page and relegated my Cowboys fan box to the 4th tab?
   
   
   


4. Harding University is ranked number 1972 in the top 4000 universities in the world according to the latest Webometrics Ranking. The ranking is supposedly based on "electronic access to scientific publications" and "other academic materials".
   


5. Check out this timeline of Internet memes. (Thanks, Jonathan.)
   
   
   

TouchGraph Facebook Browser

If you have a Facebook profile and want to see which of your friends are in your "inner circle", you might want to checkout the TouchGraph Facebook Browser. Below is screen shot showing the social connections between me and my "closest" 50 friends.


The connections between nodes is computed using betweenness centrality, a measure of a person's importance in a social network. This measure gives more weight to friends that branch other cliques. I'm not sure what the size of the nodes relate to.

The colors of the nodes indicate cliques/clusters - cliques have many friends within a group of friends but few connections to others outside the group.

• The purple group are mostly friends who were in the social club Knights with me in college.
• The red group are mainly active Harding students, employees, or spouses. Becky is in this group.
  
• The green group are people I know from when I lived in Denver years ago. My sister Sara is in this group.
• The blue group are other friends from college.
  

The large green circles are the networks my friends belong to. Most of the people in this graph are in the Harding or Little Rock network.

When I boil it down to only 4 friends, I'm left with Becky (78 friends in common), Hank Bingham (48), Jim Miller (45), and Mark Elrod (45). What would be interesting is if these connections could be recomputed based on communication levels... which friends do I communicate with the most?

Fav5

It's been a long week painting the kitchen, and I'm still not done. But I did find some time to put together my pick of the week's top 5 items of interest:

1. Despite what most Americans think about the Chinese government's censorship of the Web, 2007 survey found that over 80% of respondents said they thought the Internet should be controlled or managed, and almost 85% thought the government should be the one to do it.
   


2. Watch out: Facebook's user interface is about to make a radical change. Instead of having everything listed on a single page, items have been rearranged under their own tabs. The redesign is going to force many third party Facebook applications to modify how they work. Let the whining begin!


3. Would you still be interested in watching a football game if you knew all the plays were being called by a computer? Let's hope it never comes to this.


4. What happens when you create a salacious news article that didn't really happen, just to get people to link to your website? You either get praised or pounced.


5. Have you received your economic stimulus package yet? I hope you'll look past the shiny new whatever and give to someone who is really in need.

April Fools

I guess it's time I came clean. Michael, you're on Facebook! And you're one popular guy... already 26 friends!


Please don't turn me into the Facebook police.

Update on 4/3/2008:

Michael said he thought this was a pretty funny joke, and he promised to login once a year on April 1 to see if anything has changed. So if any of you want to be his friend, send in a request. I'll check his Facebook account about once a month and answer any outstanding friend requests. Let's see if we can push his friends count at least to 100 by April 1, 2009!