Facebook's f8 conference is shaping up to have quite a few improvements in store for developers, and we think we've come across another one: a change to Facebook's data retention policy. Yesterday, Facebook employee Monica Keller (who left MySpace to join the company last month), took part in a conversation on Twitter that seemed to indicate that developers may no longer have to delete user data. The possible change came to light after Gnip CEO Eric Marcoullier gently chided Keller about developers being unable to store any user data, to which she responded,
C. Bird, A. Gourley, P. Devanbu, M. Gertz, and A. Swaminathan. MSR '06: Proceedings of the 2006 international workshop on Mining software repositories, page 137--143. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2006)