Risto H. Kurppa: Get what’s your own. Facebook data download test.

In October Facebook announced that they will make all user data downloadable. This means that you now can download a single .zip file with all your status updates, messages, photos and profile information. You own your information and now it’s possible to do something with it, not only give it all to Facebook!

Download window

As I had a closer look at what’s this about, I found out that this is actually a treasure you definitely want to get and keep!

How to download your Facebook data?

In Facebook, click Account, select Account Settings
Click on ‘Learn more’ next to ‘Download Your Information’
Press ‘Download’ button – after reading the warnings, right :)
Press the second ‘Download’ -button
It takes a while before Facebook prepares your data to be downloaded in a single compressed file. They will e-mail you a link to the download page
Click on the link you get in the e-mail
Type in your password
Click on ‘Download now’ and the download starts

Download button

What’s in the file?

My facebook-risto.kurppa.zip was around 16MB of size. You need to extract it to get access to the files.

html folder, size 9.1MB, 15 files
photos folder, size 6.9MB, folder for each photo album and full size .jpg photos
README.txt with a single line: Downloaded by Risto H. Kurppa (http://www.facebook.com/risto.kurppa) on December 4, 2010 at 9:59 pm
index.html – this is where you start the browsing. Open it with your web browser.

Downloaded file

When you open the index.html, you can see your profile, wall, photos, friends, notes, events and messages.

Profile

Profile

This lists everything about yourself you’ve submitted to facebook. In my case it shows my b-day, ‘about’, relationship status, e-mail address, facebook profile address, website, favorite quotations, groups and names of Facebook pages I like: music, movies and other
Only the facebook profile is a link. It’d be great to have links also on each of the pages and groups to be able to see what’s ‘Paul Fenwick’s Facebook Privacy Study’ group about.

Wall

Wall

This is your wall. It shows all your status updates and all wall posts from your friends (with their names, without their profile photos)
Hovering mouse cursor on the lock icon shows you what privacy settings (=friend lists) you have shared each item with
You can see how many have liked your statuses but you can’t see who they were
You see all comments from your friends.
It would be great to have each status linked to the original status at facebook.com
It’s actually spooky to read status updates from 3 years ago!

Photos

Shows each album: Cover image, name, amount of photos and time of creation
Opening an album shows each photo in a list format with date and comments.
Clicking on a photo opens the original .jpg file. This is great – regain your photos!
HTML source uses DIV classes: photo, comments, comment, time.

Friends

Just a plain list of names. No links, no lists.
HTML source: friend class in DIV

Notes

All notes on a single page in a clean format. Comments from your friends included.
RSS imported notes don’t have a link to the original source. Too bad.
HTML classes: note, time, notebody, comments, comment

Events

Events

List of events I’ve attended or planning to attend. Actually I think it also shows all ‘Maybe’ events.
Name of the event, who started it, when, where and description
Each event has a link to the original facebook.com event. GREAT!
HTML classes: event, page, time, description

Messages

Messages

All messages you’ve sent or received in a neat clean list format
Message threads are grouped together so it’s easy to follow discussion
Again no links to the original messages in facebook.com
HTML classes: thread, message, profile, time, msgbody, subject, message reply

Summary

So you have it all there easily readable. The HTML classes make it possible to parse the data to be used elsewhere too – maybe Diaspora will benefit from this somehow?

I don’t know what made Facebook allow people to do this but overall, it’s great it’s possible. No matter if Facebook dies, you will not loose everything you’ve written there. This is definitely something I want to leave to my children. It’ll be easy for them to see that in 2009 we still had snow to ski on or what was my first status update after our wedding. It’d be awesome to read status updates of my grand parents from, say 1940’s! I have received nor written almost no letters during last 5 years. Personal E-mails are also out. Having 2784 Facebook wall events from over 3 years is a treasure to me.

So make sure you backup your Facebook every now and then and store it in a safe place.

Thank you Facebook for this. Please add the links to the original messages, status updates etc.