Gervase Markham has an insightful post about Facebook's lock-in policy with regards to e-mail. He has a way of writing about the situation that clearly explains the points I'd like to make but can never form into coherent paragraphs.

I received this lovely letter from Facebook's lawyers earlier today. The key points are transcribed below:

"Dear Mr. Finke:

I am writing you concerning the Firefox extensions you posted at:

1. www.chrisfinke.com/addons/facebook-image-to-email and
2. www.chrisfinke.com/addons/facebook-scavenger

These plug-ins are deeply concerning to Facebook because, among other things, they violate Facebook's trademark rights, its Terms of Service, the security of the site and Facebook user privacy. For example, the facebook-image-to-email extensions permits people to circumvent Facebook security measures that protect user privacy and the scavenger extension allows people to harvest data off the site in contravention of the Terms of Service and also infringes upon user privacy. [...]

I insist that you immediately take down the extensions listed above. [...]

Sincerely,

Mark Howitson
Deputy General Counsel"

At the request of (and under the threats of legal action from) Facebook, I've taken down the Facebook Image-to-Email and Facebook Scavenger Firefox extensions. Facebook claims that any method of automating against their site is a TOS violation, although if that were true, simply using a Web browser to convert their raw HTML code into readable text and images would constitute a violation.

I maintain that both tools provided a useful service that Facebook has neglected to provide itself, but I will not continue to make them available via this website. Facebook has also confirmed to me via e-mail that it will not offer users the option of having their e-mail address displayed in plain clickable text, under the guise of protecting the users' privacy. (E-mail addresses are already visible as images, but you can't click on them to send the user a message. This has the serendipitious side-effect of making Facebook's own in-site messaging system a much more attractive method of communication for Facebook users.)

A couple of things to note: while I obviously cannot retrieve any copies of these extensions that have already been downloaded, Facebook feels quite strongly that the usage of Image-to-Email and Scavenger violates their Terms of Service. They cannot stop you from using it, but they can (in theory) test for the presence of either extension and ban you from their site if you have them installed. Contact me privately via e-mail if you're concerned about your usage being detected in this manner.

I've updated Facebook Scavenger (a Firefox extension that saves a backup your Facebook friends' profile data) to add vCard export support. You can download this new version (1.1) from the Facebok Scavenger homepage, and you might want to hurry. A little birdie told me that this handy tool might not be available for too much longer.

Earlier today, I mentioned that it wouldn't be out of the question to write a Firefox extension that would grab profile data about your Facebook friends as you view their profiles so that you could take that data to another service.

Given that, allow me to introduce Facebook Scavenger. It's a Firefox extension that saves data (including e-mail addresses) from Facebook profiles that you view and then allows you to export that data in CSV format.

Note that this extension does not violate Facebook's TOS since it does not automatically load pages to retrieve profile data; rather, it reformats data that you have already seen on pages that you yourself loaded. Robert Scoble could have saved himself a lot of trouble (and avoided a lot of that nasty publicity that I'm sure he hates ;-) had he just used this extension for a few days.