The "Friend Facts" app is wending it's way through Facebook. Yet again we get to see pretty pie charts detailing the mundane facts of our inner circle. Facts we already knew, we just never visualized graphically. Or perhaps never really thought about too much.

It raises many interesting questions: has our privacy been breached? Well, not really. We all volunteered the data that has been aggregated. We are only visualizing our friend's stats, who have it in their power to change what we can see of their profiles. And, as I said before, it's mostly stuff we already knew about our friends on some level. Unless of course we're a "super-friender" and add anyone who says "Bless You" when we sneeze! ;)

What bothers me most about this app is that I have to allow some 3rd party to analyze MY data in a simple, straightforward manner. Why shouldn't I be able to do it myself? I don't want to click on each of my friend's profiles, cut and paste their data into a spreadsheet and then create charts. That's ridiculous. It's typed data - meaning that each bit has context - we know that Female/Male/I Don't Know are to indicate "Gender." It's linked data - meaning that we can move from dataset to dataset (in this case a person profile) via a simple link: this is my friend.

Why do I have to allow access to my account? Access that will then be used to 'improve my interaction with ads' and then 'anonymously aggregate' my data with millions of other people's data for research and analysis resulting in a better experience?!? Has Facebook performed better for me since I allowed this app access? Hell NO! It crashes, asks me to "Try Again" or apologizes as the makers of an app work with Facebook to iron out the kinks. I barely look at the ads. What I care about is that I have a better social networking platform.

Another thing that bugs me is that I can only analyze my Facebook stats using this app. If it's a 3rd party app, why can't I add my Twitter account? (Or MySpace, Orkut, FriendFeed, Flickr or what-have-you?) Even if it WERE NOT powered by a 3rd party app, how user-friendly is it to lock my data up in a proprietary format that I can't access easily? In case you haven't figured it out Facebook, screen-scraping SUCKS.

I won't even start in on my CRUD needs (Create-Read-Update-Delete) between sites. If I update a friend's email on one site, it should update in them all. Based on the rules I choose. But that's another post. :)

OK, enough ranting. I have to go and make sure I successfully removed Friend Facts from my authorized applications list.