Flavio about Business 2.0

Brad Fitzpatrick, the creator of LiveJournal and is the author of a variety of free software projects such as memcached has just pointed out to me that he has written a greasemonkey script that allows to export the phone numbers of your facebook friends.

The script works great, you can export to vcf which you can use on your iphone for example. Thanks Brad for putting this together!

What is also interesting to note is that facebook DOES allow you to see your friends phonenumbers in fulltext as opposed to email addresses, which are still encoded as images. That means they are implicitly allowing the export of phone numbers through scripts like Brad’s.

But we all remember what happened when Scoble tried using a tool written by plaxo’s to export his friends emails.

When will facebook finally allow the exportation of data your friends WANT so share with you?

What great news. According to Ronda, Myspace is launching data availability later today.

I haven’t been able to check out exactly the features since they are not online yet, but I am sure very excited to hear about it.

It is not clear if Myspace is allowing to interact and export more than facebook already does.

If they allow for better and easier export of data they are definitely showing leadership in the state of data portability. Facebook announced earlier the launch of facebook connect.

Let’s hope this is not a hoax.

Update: Techcrunch has some more details.

Appearently this feature has been around for ages, nevertheless I only discovered it today.

It’s called Facebook Phonebook, is accessible both on the web and on the mobile and lists all your friends which have indicated one or more phonenumbers on their profile.

Now the phonenumber functionality of course, has been there since ever, both on facebook and on xing. But I wasn’t aware that you could so easily have an overview over all your friends phonenumbers.

Now I certainly don’t have all these numbers on my cellphone. So it could be really useful to have all these numbers here. A lot of time you write people messages back and forth, when it would be so much more efficient to just give them a call and discuss things or make decisions quickly (like finding a time for a meeting).

What is still not there is the export functionality. Facebook joined the Dataportability Group, but still nothing has changed. Why can’t I export MY data to my cellphone? My friends are sharing this information with me, because they want me to have it! I can export it manually, so why shouldn’t a software be able to do that for me? It would not decrease user privacy by an inch.

More on the matter here: Flavio Rump on Scoble, and the video interview