Fun with Facebook, Part 1

(This is a continuation of this post)

So after a few hours, Facebook finally finished preparing the zip file with all my info and sent me a download link. They had some interesting security features to make sure that no one else would be able to download it. Not only did I have to re-enter my password, but I had to identify a bunch of my friends. They picked three pictures of each friend at random, and asked me to pick who it was from a list of names. Very cool method, and makes it unlikely that someone will get tricked into giving this info to someone else by a simple phishing scam or something.

Anyway, when I finally got to the zip file itself, it was only 60 megabytes, much smaller than expected. Most of the data is stored in very simple html, and there's an index file to let you access all of it in a format very similar to Facebook itself.

Sometimes I wish that Facebook itself looked this simple (click for original).

Here's a quick rundown of all the info it has:

Profile

This is pretty straightforward, it's basically a straight dump of everything you'd get by clicking "Info" on your Facebook profile, plus the "About Me" box underneath your profile picture. Interestingly, it seems like it only got my main contact email, even though I also have my personal email listed on Facebook.

Wall

This has quite literally anything that's ever been posted on your wall since you created your account, including status updates, videos, photos, links, posts from friends, as well as the comments on everything. Oddly, it lists the number of people who liked something, rather than their actual names. Everything has absolute timestamps, instead of Facebook's often annoying habit of displaying them as relative timestamps (e.g. "yesterday", "a few minutes ago").

Photos

This includes all the albums of photos that you've uploaded, along with comments, tags, and captions. Unfortunately, it doesn't include pictures uploaded by other people that you've been tagged in.

Videos

Basically the same deal as photos: includes all the ones you've uploaded, but not ones from other people that you're tagged in.

Friends

Pretty bare, just a big list of all of your friends. I wish it included a bit more info, like what friend lists they're in or what gender they are, but all it has is their names.

Notes

Again, similar to photos and videos. Just all the Notes you've written on one page, including tags, comments, and any images you embedded.

Events

For each event you've RSVPed for, this page has its name, creator, time, location, and description. Oddly, it looks like it even saves events for which you responded "Not Attending", as opposed to removing it from your events, but I'm not positive. Maybe I really did hit "Maybe" for all these things I never went to.

Messages

This includes both actual messages and the updates sent out by whatever pages you're a fan of. Again, everything's all together on one page, with responses threaded under the source message.

I'm probably going to tackle the friend list first, and see what kind of interesting things I can do with it. For all the rest, I'm going to need to find some HTML-parsing library and figure it out, but the friends are all text, so I can just dive in.