Facebook: Download Everything
Everyone knows about facebook. Most people that know about facebook use it. Last year, facebook reported passing the 500 million active user mark. Let's reflect on that. The World Bank reports the population of the world to be 6,775,235,741. If we divide that number by the number of facebook users (500,000,000), we get roughly 13.5. This means that 1 in every 13 people alive, right now, including newborns and infants, have a facebook account. Hold on, let's reduce that 6.7 billion to 5.4 billion since China can't use facebook. Now we're hovering close to 1 in every 10 people- slightly more impressive.
So we've established a lot of people use facebook, okay. I consider myself an average facebook user. I have around 200 friends, have a couple photo albums, posted 3 or 4 videos, and have a bunch of wall posts. All together, there's just over 100MB of information I've added to facebook. Sounds kinda substantial for one person, but consider I have a bunch of photos on there too! If you multiply the 100MB, considered average data, by the number of active users, we get something like 50 thousand gigabytes (or 10TB). Keep in mind this doesn't include all the information they've collected on your usage habits, keywords that relate to you, and all that stuff that lets facebook make a pretty penny from your pretty face.
Oh right- the purpose of this post! You can now download everything you have added to facebook. It's easy, and it's nice to see what you have on there, and what facebook can look through at any time. To do this:
- Log in to facebook
- Click Account
- Click Account Settings
- Now you'll be at a new page with a bunch of options. Click learn more beside Download Your Information
- Here you are presented with some blah, blah, blah telling you how sensitive the information is, just click the Download button and facebook will start putting together your goods
- Now we just have to give it some time and wait for the email to arrive in our inbox. Once it's there, you'll have a link you can follow to download everything you've ever put on facebook
You'll see hundreds of photos, some videos, a list of your friends, a list of your wall posts, and all of your notes presented to you in a nice .zip archive. I found it interesting that some of the pictures retained their original names (the filenames before I uploaded them to facebook).
Yeah- there's a lot.