bigsight

Dan Birdwhistell and Ben Sinclair, the two guys behind bigsight, on Tuesday launched a new application called FriendCSV that allows Facebook users to do a large-scale data export from their friends’ profile pages. The application has since received widespread media attention and sparked intense debate about privacy and social networks. “On Monday evening, I desperately needed a way to better visualize friend data from Facebook, and given that we have launched a few apps recently, Ben was quite familiar with the API. I was surprised when he said that he could actually do a full export of data from my entire friend group. So after spending an hour or two with all of the TOS, Privacy, and Developer Documentation, I realized that not only was this possible, but almost encouraged by Facebook, despite much of the discussion that the site is a ‘walled garden’,” shared Birdwhistell.

By early Tuesday morning, Ben had hacked together a functional app, and not more than a few hours later, Techcrunch, the leading tech blog on the net, picked the story up and ran with it. “The Facebook Developer Platform allows developers to do pretty extraordinary things inside the network, but until we launched this app, no one had really pushed on the outward edges of what could be done with friend data. People were shocked to realize how much could be done.” By 5pm on Tuesday, the application had received over 800 exports and attention on over 1,000 blogs and tech news sites. “This really appears to be the start of a much larger discussion that we’ll be having in the coming months. Ben and I were happy to throw something into the fire that sparked it, but we’re looking forward to getting back to growing bigsight.org in the next few weeks.” In addition to the CSV app, Ben and Dan also recently launched an app called Backstory which allows users to show and share the things that have influenced them in life.