"The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site."
"You can access a Web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site."
"The isolation occurs because each piece of information does not have a URI"
Except for email addresses of friends, a third-party site can access as much of a user's Facebook data as the user wants to make available. Statements to the contrary are common, but false.
So there's a site with the main purpose of maintaining a list of contacts and everything is as openly accessible as users want. Everything but contact information. That makes no sense to me at all.
There's that completely disingenuous argument that my contacts' privacy would somehow be violated if I could export my address book. But it was me who they entrusted with their contact info. If someone shares a phone number with me, it's for me to decide what to do with it, not for the phone company or the handset maker, so why is Facebook keeping my address book hostage?
I think Facebook should make email addresses accessible via its APIs. That shortcoming, however, is a far cry from what Berners-Lee says in this article.
So why is there always a login page when a link points to Facebook? Just a casual observation, I don't know much about the inner workings of FB. I just have yet to see a link to FB that does not require a login.
"The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site."
"You can access a Web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site."
"The isolation occurs because each piece of information does not have a URI"
Except for email addresses of friends, a third-party site can access as much of a user's Facebook data as the user wants to make available. Statements to the contrary are common, but false.