Ummm, Facebook's wall is quite a bit less ominous than Apple's. You may want to return that irony to the store, they cheated you and watered it down.

The walls are still there. Facebook is still a roach motel for data and now they are going to be spanking platform developers whose apps are proving to be detrimental to Facebook's reputation and user experience. Same tune, different band.

It's not really surprising in either case I feel. For Facebook, their social network is their greatest value. For Apple, it's their experience.

It takes more courage than I can imagine to put your golden egg on a pedestal for anyone to touch, study, steal.

Sucks for developers, sure, but at some point devs start to sound kind of greedy. In both cases, you're getting the privilege to play in a very, very market. At the very least, you should respect the risk these companies take.

Resigning to the fact that you're a sharecropper[1] is implicit in developing on Apple platforms.

[1] http://weblog.raganwald.com/2004/11/sharecropping-in-orchard...

" In both cases, you're getting the privilege to play in a very, very market."

You've omitted a word or two.

What is implied by a roach motel for data?

I hate walled gardens. But I really don't think they are objectively the same tune different band. You're saying they will be spanking platform devs who's apps prove detrimental...well that's pretty different from Apple. Hugely different. Hmmm, hardly in the same class.

[edited to move part to a different parent comment]

It's a reference to the old roach motel slogan: "Roaches check in, but they can't check out".

In this case, referring to the fact that Facebook doesn't exactly go out of their way to provide you with the ability to 'take your data and leave'. Can you get an easy dump of all of your comments? Your friends' contact info? Your photos?

Cool metaphor, I'll have to remember that.

Yes, through the API.

Almost everything in facebook is openly accessible via API if you've granted permissions to an applications to do so. We've seen services like Tweetdeck and Seesmic and Brizzly act like portals to the data.

Things get complicated with friends' data of course. Facebook has a collection of your friends phone numbers, and data access permissions and storage rights get complicated.

You work at Facebook, I know you say that on your profile, but you should probably disclose that in comments supporting them.

I disagree. Bending over backwards to recuse myself would distract from the content of the comments. I've pretty much only stated facts here anyway.

If I start saying an opinion like Facebook is better than X, then I think you're right.

I used to work for a social network that wanted to let users get their own photos out of Facebook and into our network. We built a Facebook app that expressly served this purpose; users only enabled it after knowing what it would do and desiring that consequence.

A few weeks after we added this feature, Facebook told us if we kept doing this -- if we kept letting users import their own photos -- our API access would be terminated.

So, yeah, walled garden.

What was the name of your application? When was this?

About a year ago; I'm no longer with the company. It was http://chi.mp/

IHNJ, IJLS spanking platform

Collecting intimate personal details and selling it to advertisers is less ominous than screening apps to ensure quality?

For that the key is the privacy controls. We can argue about whether Facebook's privacy controls are good enough, whether they are selling our data, and so on. But that's got nothing to do with the Apple walled-garden comparison.

I can write a FB app and have it up in a jiffy, that's just not the case with Apple. And I will be so very very surprised if Facebook censors a dictionary app.

> I can write a FB app and have it up in a jiffy, that's just not the case with Apple

If FB doesn't like your app they'll have it down in a jiffy too. It's not nearly so clear cut as you make out. Their review process is just reactive instead of front-loaded.

From a developer standpoint, immensely so.

huh!? O_o

What matters here isn't "Are Apple and Facebook soulless and oppressive corporations?" (I'd argue no, lots of people would argue yes; either way it's not important.) What matters is how each is treating its developers. Facebook is open to developers and their publications; Apple isn't.

I thought they shut down that program recently?

You're talking about Beacon, which would gather data about what you're doing on other sites.

Recall that you pay nothing to use facebook, whereas with an iPhone, something that you physically own, you're not even really allowed to do as you please with it.

Agreed. It rings even more hollow given the recent revelation about widespread scams in Facebook apps.

If his company was doing as good a job at protecting users as Apple had, I'd be more inclined to listen to him. The position he's taken is a purely self-interested one, asking for more developer freedom without even acknowledging the difficult challenge Apple faces, and without admitting that maybe his company could learn something from them.

Describe a social network with user-friendly privacy controls that doesn't fall under your definition of "walled garden".

One with a link that says "Click here to download all your data."

I know Facebook API and could make that without too much effort. Do you think the demand is there? What format would users want such data in?

they're getting closer but they're not there yet. they have an API method in beta that allows you to pull the last 50 posts of a user's mini-feed, and then you can grab comments for each post in the mini feed, but that's not going to get you all user contributions.