Friends+Me / Loysoft Limited -- about the firm, data and credential use, technology, etc.
Answering a question I'd asked about the firm, its Google+ Exporter application, and credential and data use:
1. The Google+ Exporter application is owned and created by Loysoft Limited a UK based company.
2. We do not store or use or gather any personal info or password. Everything is stored locally on a user computer.
The application is using Electron framework, meaning Chromium web browser is a core of the application and provides visualization engine for user and node.js for the app execution.
A user of the app is signing in to Google account just so the app can get access to Google+ feed to export. Nothing more, nothing less.
3. No information is sent from the application. We just use sentry.io error reporting, so in case the application crashes an anonymized error report is sent.
4. No, there's no 3rd-party audit of the application. We have a good reputation around here and we do not intend to mess it up in any way.
https://plus.google.com/+FriendsPlusMe/posts/jSFYkqFBMJZ
Answering a question I'd asked about the firm, its Google+ Exporter application, and credential and data use:
1. The Google+ Exporter application is owned and created by Loysoft Limited a UK based company.
2. We do not store or use or gather any personal info or password. Everything is stored locally on a user computer.
The application is using Electron framework, meaning Chromium web browser is a core of the application and provides visualization engine for user and node.js for the app execution.
A user of the app is signing in to Google account just so the app can get access to Google+ feed to export. Nothing more, nothing less.
3. No information is sent from the application. We just use sentry.io error reporting, so in case the application crashes an anonymized error report is sent.
4. No, there's no 3rd-party audit of the application. We have a good reputation around here and we do not intend to mess it up in any way.
https://plus.google.com/+FriendsPlusMe/posts/jSFYkqFBMJZ
I can confirm the good reputation, I am and have been using their main product for quite some time, and they've been recommended to me by a renowned Plusser.
ReplyDeleteThank you Edward Morbius 👍
ReplyDeleteYes, +1 for Friends+Me... Very solid rep.
ReplyDeleteThanks Quork Q'Tar and Thomas Tenkely
ReplyDeleteThis looks like it has the same problem as takeout. It only provides links to images which won't work after G+ shuts down.
ReplyDeleteThank you for posting this information. As one of the people who questioned the legitimacy of this app, this was enough to convince me to try it (after searching a bit for the company). It seems to do what it says and looks like it will work for me, unlike Google Takeout.
ReplyDeleteLeonard Harris I'd been discussing that with Friends+Me in an earlier thread.
ReplyDeleteFirst off: in some ways, this is a feature. The inclusion of images in Google Data Takeout is proving to be a massive headache -- they're huge and duplicated many times within archives. What could be only a few tens or hundreds of MB can become tens or hundreds of GB of data ... almost all of it redundant, and quite possibly of little or no interest.
Because the image URLs are captured by the Friends+Me Google+ Exporter, it should be reasonably simple to either add a module or a standalone tool which would then grab those as well. Getting first text then images should in general be more useful for people, particularly as even prolific writers would have difficulty coming up with more than a GB or so of text. It's far easier to create very large image stashes.
There's work ongoing with Google to see if the duplicates issue can be addressed. I'm only very modestly optimistic there. Google are being exceedingly uncommunicative and there are numerous signs of internal confusion and chaos.
I'm warming up to the Friends+Me archiver and tools generally. There are people I've known for a long time who've been using other products for years, which is encouraging. And they've been exceedingly responsive on G+.
Leonard Harris we may actually come up with an image downloader tool in Q1 2019 soon enough to give everyone enough time for download.
ReplyDeleteFriends+Me Nice.
ReplyDeleteA concern we've had / seen is that people might be deleting content in the face of the shutdown. I don't have a good sense of that yet.
I am doing another larger study of G+ communities (aiming to get some sense of "vitality"), and noticed that the total community count has actually increased over the past few weeks. When I checked on 22-23 November it was 7.9 million, it's now slightly over 8 million, total.
(I'm sampling 36,000 communities, randomly selected, now, in process and I've got to figure out how I'm parsing the results. Plan is to look at the posting rate / pace, based on posts on the first Community page, and their age, plus whatever other useful information I can suck out of this. Large sample to try to get more of the larger groups.)
The increase is 82,330 communities (of 8 million total). About 1%.
New total is 8,056,611 communities.
Edward Morbius more communities? That's crazy!
ReplyDeleteI would love to know the results of your research.
Friends+Me So would I! I tend to work for fast-and-dirty (though defensible) results. May have something in a day or two based on initial analysis.
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty good at scraping stuff off the Web, less so at parsing messy HTML (which is to say: what Google serves up), though I'll see what I can get from this.
New communities? Like this one.
ReplyDeleteThe net add is about the same size as total deletions I'm seeing. That may be skewed by my collection lag, but with a current sitemap list, about 8,000 communities (extrapolated) are being deleted per day.
ReplyDeleteMore numbers: Depending on the pace of deletions, the deletes are a lot higher than the net adds.
ReplyDeleteExplanation: I downloaded a fresh set of G+ Community Sitemaps, and began downloading Community homepages from those within an hour. The full pull took over 16 hours (I could grab more aggressively, I'm opting to avoid doing so, net rate is ~30 requests/minute).
Thirteen of the 36,000 turned up missing (HTTP 302 status), based on saved headers.
If the possiblity of being deleted increases with time, then I don't want to take a straight percentage (100 * 13/36000), but want to consider that there's a higher likelihood of deletion with time. If not, then the straight percentage works. Assuming the sitemaps are instantaneously updated, I could use an area-under-the-triangle estimate, and essentially double my rate (so: 100 * 26/36000).
Dividing by 16 hours gives me a rate.
Straight rate:
You have: ((13/36000)*8055611)/16 hours
You want: /day
* 4363.456
Triangular rate (assume increasing likelihood with time):
You have: ((2*13/36000)*8055611)/16 hours
You want: /day
* 8726.9119
The answer likely lies between these two estimates. I'll go with the straight rate:
You have: ((2*13/36000)*8055611)/16 hours
You want: /month
* 265619.71
So, 256,619 communities are being deleted every month based on this.
And yet the net gain is 82,330 over 26 days, or 94,996 (let's call it 95k) per month. So 360,615 communities were formed (4.5% of the total), over a quarter million deleted, and a net of 82k are new.
Again, this is a snapshot over the past 26 days, I have no idea how this corresponds to earlier activity.
But it's a lot of churn.