Today I saw a pretty useless product announced on TechCrunch called FriendCSV which extracts your Facebook friends into a CSV file sans their PII (i.e. no email address, no IM screen names, no telephone numbers, no street address). Amusingly enough, the authors of the application brag about using the Facebook platform as it was designed to be used as if they have figured out some major exploit.

However it did remind me of a pretty cool desktop application that I found via Bubba called OutSync. It synchronizes the photos of your contacts in Outlook with those of any matching people found on your friends list in Facebook. If you have a Windows Mobile smartphone that is synchronized with your Exchange server like I do, it means that you get all your friends photos on your phone which is pretty sweet especially when you get a call from that person. Screenshots below

There’s that user-centric authentication model where the user grants the application access without giving the application their username/password. Again, I’m glad OAuth is standardizing this for the Web.

When I think of the Facebook platform embracing the “Web as a Platform” I want to see more applications like this enabled. Instead of only utilizing my Facebook social graph in the Facebook Marketplace or the Buy.com Facebook application, why can’t it be utilized on eBay or Craigslist? I want all the applications I use to be able to utilize my social graph to make themselves better without having to be widgets on a particular social networking site before they can take advantage of this knowledge. 

Back in 2004, I wrote

Basically, we've gotten rid of one of major complaints about online services; maintaining to many separate lists of people you know. One of the benefits of this is that you can utilize this master contact list across a number of scenarios outside of just one local application like an email application or an IM client. For example, in MSN Spaces we allow users to use their MSN Messenger allow list (people you've granted permission to contact you via IM) as a access control list for who can view your Space (blog, photo album, etc). There are a lot more interesting things you can do once the applications you use can tell "here are the people I know, these are the ones I trust, etc". We may not get there as an industry anytime soon but MSN users will be reaping the benefits of this integration in more and more ways as time progresses.

It’s unfortunate that almost 3 years later we haven’t made much progress on this across the industry although it looks like the Facebook platform has gotten people finally thinking about unified social graphs. Better late than never, I guess. 

The one mistake I’ve been making in my thinking has been narrowly defining the applications that should have access to your Windows Live social graph as Microsoft or Windows Live applications. My thinking has since evolved as has that of lots of folks in the B0rg cube. It will be an interesting couple of months with regards to social graph APIs especially with Google’s November 5th announcement coming up.

PS: Anyone else noticed that the installer for OutSync is hosted on SkyDrive?

PPS: I got a phone call from Rob Dolin earlier this evening and the pic from his Facebook profile showed up my phone. Sweet!

Now playing: Soulja Boy - Crank That (Soulja Boy)