I think I’ve officially “resolved” the data portability drama with Facebook, and this post (more or less) will serve as my catharsis regarding my dispute with what I consider to be my biggest regrets in geek hood.
Vanity Of Vanities
When I joined Facebook many years ago, I did it for the sole purpose of forming closer relationships with friends I’ve met in person or communicated with extensively over email, twitter, blogs, etc.
I’ve never been fond of their chat programs, or even their spammy games like Farmville, Mafia wars, and the zillion clones that popped no matter how hard I tried filtering them out.
But I tolerated it because I wanted to connect with my friends as all of them were using it.
Until that is…
Rage Against The Machine
…Facebook decided to make everyone’s private profiles public.
Outraged, many of my friends threatened deletion (some actually did), while others abandoned Facebook altogether.
I debated against either option and still kept Facebooking on.
At least until I discovered that the social network lacked true data portability, which is geek speak for “all your contacts, images and videos belong to Facebook!”
Exodus And The Digital Death
I quickly discovered that all of the legal ways of removing your data off of Facebook’s servers were “mysteriously” not working, after becoming too popular.
After trying dozens of services (freemium, premium and free) to legally export my data off of Facebook’s servers for safe keeping (at least according to their API), I became frustrated and almost deleted my account (I actually found the one click button after a long search).
A wiser friend talked me out of doing that (30 seconds before I was going to click the button too), so instead I removed 99% of my personal data from the site & temporarily disconnected every service from Facebook (which pissed off my friend, hence this long post).
The Back Door
Later on my friend kept bugging me on when I would return to Facebook (as I had already deleted the app off of my iPhone) which I replied “when they allow me to export my images off site” (I had already given up on videos being exported).
I later agreed I would return if I could export my images off site.
After an hour of us Googling, we discovered a WordPress plugin that Facebook “broke,” but the author had figured out a way to download our images in high quality (you can contact me for more info regarding the plugin as I’m not sure how long it will remain functional).
The plugin worked like a charm and now I have all of my images on my own server. 
Left Overs For Facebook
After this whole dilemma my trust of Facebook is at a all time low, and while I did rejoin the Facecult, I’m no longer uploading my primary data (images, videos, etc.) to the site, but instead will push data to Facebook from other platforms (so my friend can stop bugging me).
I purchased a Flickr premium account to host my images and short videos, while YouTube will host the longer ones over 90 seconds.
My private Twitter account will update my statices while Tumblr will fill in the gap.
As far as social goes, I’m now becoming a more active member of iRovr, which has a hyper active community (I’ll post my thoughts about them later).
So while Facebook will still be able to collect info regarding my geek habits (unless I’m on iRovr), they will no longer be privileged to receive primary access to my data (key words are “my data”), but instead view them through the lens of rival third party clients.
< /catharsis >
–Posted from my iPhone
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