Facebook has blocked a Google Chrome extension that let you export information about your Facebook friends so that data can be shuttled into competing services and the extension had become particularly popular of late as a means of moving friends data into Google’s latest Facebook challenger Google+. Scammers are exploiting the fact that Google+’s field testing is a close and they are leveraging Facebook 500 million+ users by offering a free hot, in-demand, valuable, invitation to test Google’s social network Google+ just by doing something Facebook users do all the time………..
Google+ had generated insane demand within a couple of days of its launch could easily beat the Facebook frenzy of more than 500 million usesr and it is possible when it could get access to the information of the long preserved friends in Facebook. A Chrome extension makes that process a lot easier by automating the extraction of contact information that your Facebook contacts have shared. The extension, from open-source programmer Mohamed Mansour is called Facebook Friend Exporter. It’s not a simple one-click process, but it’s close. The tool, though, likely won’t sit well at the dominant social-networking site. Section 3.2 of Facebook‘s terms of service states, “You will not collect users’ content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission.” The arrival of Google+ has brought new concrete reality to the previously somewhat academic spat in 2010 between Facebook and Google about who owns information about your social-network connections. Mansour, who by the way also wrote a Chrome extension that lets you cross-post Google+ messages to Twitter and Facebook, said he agrees with Google.
“I am scraping my own data that my Facebook friends allowed me to use and view,” Mansour said in a Google+ conversation about the extension. “Facebook doesn’t own my friends. I want my friends to be in a place that is easily accessible, extractable, and shareable. And if that results a ban/expulsion/termination, so be it.” He offers this note of caution, though: ” Use at your own risks! From the 30K+ users who used it, no one got a ban notice from Facebook, but I don’t guarantee that.” Facebook didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Mansour‘s extension jumps straight into the fracas by copying the information your contacts have shared with you already on Facebook–name, e-mail address, phone number, birthday, Web site, address, then letting you save it as a spreadsheet file or import it directly into your Gmail address book. Even though the Chrome extension lets you extract the Facebook contact information, it still can be a lot of work to sort it properly in Google+. If you have 20 friends on Facebook, it’s not too big a deal. The extension doesn’t solve the biggest problem with Google+, though: getting people to actually use it. Even when an easy sign-up replaces Google+ beta‘s hobbled invitation process, you’ll still have to convince your Facebook pals to tune into another conversation channel. And people might not necessarily list Gmail addresses at Facebook, making it harder to get in touch over Google+, which of course requires a Google account.
