In earlier posts I tried to compare start-ups and quasars, and social networks with expanding universes. Now I would like to take a look a “black holes” and their relation to social networks.
From the inside social networks are like expanding universes, they grow bigger each day by adding more members, more relationships, and more informations. From the outside they are quite the opposite: they are acting like big black holes who suck in information and make it inaccessible for everyone outside. Robert Scoble compared large closed corporate social networks like Facebook to black holes and coined the term “data black holes”. Data vanishes inside these black holes, and never comes out again. Can we save the common, open web or is it too late?
Currently, Facebook behaves indeed much like a data black hole who sucks in a larger part of the web and private information every day. Facebook is much more closed in this respect than Google+, which has like Twitter a public feed, better private/public sharing options through the “circle” feature, and it allows the export of data by “Data Liberation”. After the IPO, Facebook wants to grow and expand its own intergalactic advertising universe even further. Whether this will be successful or not will be seen. Will Facebook be able to beat Google AdWords with their own Advertising programm by sucking in the majority of information and traffic of the web? What do you think?
(The image of a quasar or growing black hole is from Wikipeda and can be found here)
4 Lines of Code 
It is possible to export all of your data through using the Facebook API, but it is not a super simple process. Yet, it does allow for Facebook to not be a complete “black hole”, and leaves the ability for another app to import Facebook data.
I agree, Facebook is rotting the Internet.