Archive Facebook Matthew Kelly Old Dominion University
What is it? Add-on for Mozilla Firefox Allows you to grab a stand- alone archive of your Facebook account at that point in time Archive Facebook
Current Methods “Doesn’t Facebook already allow you to do this?” – FB allows you to download your information but the look-and-feel is lost, removing the familiarity of traversing one’s FB content ArchiveFacebook uses the browser’s rendering engine = WYSIWYG Archive Facebook
Why is this important? FB’s facilities to backup your profile do not preserve look-and-feel FB’s backup is a simple file structure, so removes ease of viewing to which user is accustomed Archive integrity – What gets downloaded with FB’s method is of their choosing Archive Facebook
Why is this important? FB can delete account at their discretion Account may be compromised and data lost forever Archive Facebook
Why is this important? Information is frozen-in-time, so will remain even if comments are deleted, posts are modified, etc. Provides potential for expansion into archiving other Facebook pages – Friends’ Facebook pages – Group Fan Pages Archive Facebook
How Does it Work Minimal UI provides navigation ease – only one menu item selection to get started Archive Facebook Pick and choose what you want archived based on a list of supported media type Can choose defaults and archive all Very few clicks produce significant results
How do I access my archive? New menu item added Restoring is as simple as clicking the dated archive’s name Archived files are stored locally and can be backed up to alternative medium, viewed by other applications and treated as normal files on the system Archive Facebook
What it Doesn’t Do (Yet) Chain together various archiving sessions – each session is independent from all others. Allow you to archive anything beyond your own information – This would violate FB’s TOS, has been implemented but the functionality is hidden Archive Facebook Maintain robustness through FB’s redesigns
Complications in Developing the Add-On No prior experience in Add-On Dev Domain FB occasionally changed their URI scheme and data storage method, which breaks ArchiveFB Archiving can take awhile (inherent to the problem) Archive Facebook
Further Suggested Improvements Appeal code to social media sites other than FB (e.g. G+, MySpace) Allow for automatic archiving based on a user- defined period Give an option to store archives in a user- defined location Archive Facebook
Where can I get it? US/firefox/addon/archivefacebook/ or - Archive Facebook