Friday, November 12, 2010

Exporting Contacts from Facebook - How many care?

There have been discussions around how Facebook is evil about not letting "everyone" get their contact data out unless they happen to have a free yahoo or hotmail account. The discussions 

Techcrunch has an article today about how to create a new yahoo account to get most of your contact data out.

Do people care about their contact data? How many of them do?

The contact data I'm importing to Facebook is already with me on gmail, why do I care if Facebook is gonna lock it down? Even if we consider that I might need contact data of my new Facebook friends, how many people are still use email anyways? Isn't most communication thru Facebook status and messages or IM's.

People who care about the data are in minority. Techcrunch reaches 0.7% global users while Facebook has 37.3% global reach. Even if 10 fold techcrunch readers cared about their data, they are still not enough.

I know it can be debated that people have no option but to join where their friends are. Would you make deposits in a bank where you cannot withdraw the interest that your money generates? The point being people don't value their contacts like Facebook does.

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