In light of todays events, the team at Sociall have decided to prioritise a new feature on the platform. This unique feature will allow users to migrate their Facebook data directly into Sociall. A watered-down version of this feature was planned for December this year, as per the roadmap within our whitepaper. The original plans were to simply link your Facebook account temporarily to find users that you may already know. We have now decided to have full profile and posts import options so that new users on Sociall can have a fully populated profile and news feed instantly.

Here is a breakdown of how this will work.

A new user can choose to sign up to Sociall the traditional way, or they can click the new “Migrate from Facebook” button. The user will have an option to also import their friends list and posts. Both of these features are optional The user will be prompted with a Facebook alert asking them to give Sociall permissions and access to some basic information. The user’s profile on Sociall will be populated with information from Facebook such as their first name, last name, date of birth, gender, country, profile cover picture, and display picture. If the user opted in for the friends list import, then Sociall will temporarily download their full friends list from Facebook and display all users on Sociall that the user was friends with on Facebook. If the user opted in for the posts import, then Sociall will begin importing the last 20 posts from this user’s Facebook profile. All images will also be uploaded. A final prompt will be displayed to the user asking if they want to create a new post on Facebook inviting their friends to join Sociall. This step is completely optional. The user will then be taken to the Sociall home page where they should hopefully have a populated news feed after following some friends that they already know from Facebook. The new user should also have a populated profile with existing posts, along with a new post on Facebook to tell their users to sign up to Sociall.

After these steps are complete, no link between your Sociall profile and Facebook will ever be made again. You will not be logging into Sociall with Facebook. The above steps are simply there to migrate your data from Facebook to Sociall.

How are we going to do this?

All of the above will be completed by integrating with Facebook’s Graph API. It is the easiest approach for the end-user. We could have gone down the path of importing Facebook’s data archive that they “willingly” allow you to export, although the processes behind this and the loops that Facebook makes users jump through is very painful and takes a long time. It also requires a large zip download of ~500mb, although this number varies on your Facebook usage.

We will also be storing the user’s Facebook profile ID alongside a user’s data within the database for profile matching. For example, if Bob migrates from Facebook, we will store his Facebook user ID. This is so that if Jane migrates from Facebook and is friends with Bob on Facebook, we can display to her that she knows Bob. We will allow users to remove their Facebook ID from Sociall in the near future if they wish.

We already have a spec for the integration and it’s in the final stages of planning. We hope to begin this as soon as the major bugs found within the closed beta are fixed.

When will it be ready?

We have only just begun planning of this tool and we do not have an estimated release date yet. In saying that, we hope to have this feature completed while still in beta. Please note that since we are prioritising this feature, some other features specified in our roadmap may be pushed back by a few weeks. A new updated roadmap within the whitepaper will be added after the feature is completed.

Closed beta progress

The closed beta is going extremely well. We have been bug fixing non-stop, and the platform is becoming far more stable. We will be sending out more closed beta invitations within the next 24 hours or less.

Bugs and issues in Sociall will still take priority over the Facebook migration tool. Although since we have recently expanded the team (and still looking for another developer), fixing issues should not slow down the development of the new tool.