Facebook

Like it or hate it or a lot of both, Facebook is the ten-ton gorilla of social-networking systems at the moment. It wasn't always this way and probably won't always be (something new will eventually come along and take over as the "Big Thing"), but at the moment it's where many many people keep up with their friends, acquaintances, and people they barely know. And it keeps changing its interface, has "privacy policies" that don't particularly protect privacy, is likely at any moment to come up with increasingly annoying ways to "monetize" its squillions of users, and offers no particularly useful way to retrieve your own data off of it.

That's why Archive Team has started a project called "Faceoff" which is attempting to create a set of programs, utilities, libraries, etc., to let users get their Facebook history exported from that service to ensure it is preserved no matter what happens to the service (or if the user chooses to close their account and go elsewhere).

Links

 * Facebook itself, as if you needed a hyperlink to find its URL
 * Archive Team's Faceoff project