Wow! Facebook is clearly on high alert (ie. They’re scared shitless) by Google+. A lot of the cool stuff that Google baked into Google+ from the beginning, Facebook is playing catch up with. Just in the last day or two, Facebook has copied yet another Google+ exclusive in another “ME TOO!” move. This time it’s with Google’s “Data Liberation” feature which was implemented to show one of the major philosophical differences between the two services. Facebook didn’t let you get anything you wanted, especially contact information. Google lets you download everything. Facebook now does almost exactly the same thing.
Here are the two features side by side:
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| Google’s “Data Liberation” | Facebook’s “Download Your Information” |
The only notable differences I’ve seen is that Facebook won’t let you download contact data if the person who owns that data disabled it in their privacy settings. Though, I’ve seen reports that Facebook is also downloading the entire photo archive of each of your friends, if those friends mentioned you in any images. I started the download of mine from Facebook a few minutes ago. I should be e-mailed when it’s done. I’ll update this post to see if that rumor is true and to also report on the quality of the data. I’ve already done this for Google+ and it seems to work as expected.