There will eventually be a great turning point on the web when everyone finally understands most of the privacy issues and makes a decision on whether they really want their lives to be private or not. If they go for privacy, Facebook will fizzle out--their business model depends fundamentally on invading privacy. If not, Facebook may just take over the world.
Whatever you think of Mark Zuckerberg, you have to respect him for this. He knows his information is available through the API, he has chosen to make it publicly available.<p>It is ultimate dogfooding; equivalent to being able to see Eric's and Larry's and Sergey's searches.<p>EDIT: blackswan is right; tamed down the comparison to Google in the last phrase
I'm not sure why people are so offended by what Facebook has done. They've just made the information people made publicly available <i>already</i> easy to parse for computers. Full disclosure: I had no way to prepare for Facebook's new features and I haven't change a single privacy settings since it launched. I just used this site to check what was publicly available for the first time and none of it was a surprise except my events and I don't feel invaded in any way. Feel free to browse around my profile.<p><a href="http://zesty.ca/facebook/#/aroon" rel="nofollow">http://zesty.ca/facebook/#/aroon</a>
This seems to integrate exactly with your existing privacy settings, so I guess there was no real surprise here. Mine were pretty much on lock-down anyway. I found myself, and every single link except my profile picture and my likes showed "data empty".