Scoble + Plaxo vs. Facebook

Ther recent imbroglio over internet celebrity Robert Scoble being banned from Facebook raises some long-overdue questions.  It appears that Scoble used a beta version of a tool from Plaxo to extract his social graph from his Facebook account.  Facebook's automated mechanisms detected a heavier-than usual pattern of access and shut off his account until he appealed.  The account has since been reinstated, but not until it caused a Facebook group Facebook re-open Robert Scoble account !!!!! to gather 539 members and the TechCrunch post to generate 93 comments.  While the comments contained the usual quotient of foaming-at-the mouth, several legitimate points were raised:

• Scoble clearly violated Facebook's Terms of Use, to which of course all users carefully read before they "agree" to by clicking as they sign up.  "...you agree not to use the Service or the Site to...use automated scripts to collect information from or otherwise interact with the Service or the Site"
• Facebook goes to some lengths to obfuscate the email addresses on a profile by displaying them as bitmaps, which Plaxo cheerfully OCRs back into text.
• While Facebook touts its openness, is it really open if it prevents its users from taking their data with them, and whose data is it anyway?

This last point is the important one.  If I display my email address on my profile, or for that matter if I give someone by business card or tell them my email address, do I have any right to control what they do with it?  While I may have legal recourse if they use it so sent me spam, it's really no business of mine whether they load it into Outlook, Plaxo, or write it on the back of their hand with a Sharpie.  Perhaps the fact that the process is automated may give someone pause, that is only a matter of degree.

If we were to deal forthrightly with the matter of ownership of one's social graph, it might make sense to make a distinction between the nodes and the arcs.  Clearly the arcs of my social graph (who I am friends with) are my property, although one could make the case that the nodes (the information about each of my friends) should be controlled by the people described by the nodes. Ultimately this gets into the area of nondiscretionary controls, which as Ray Ozzie has pointed out, are easy to fake but almost impossible to implement.

Comments

[John McCrea]

"it's really no business of mine whether they load it into Outlook, Plaxo, or write it on the back of their hand with a Sharpie"

Bravo. So well said, I may have to borrow your turn of phrase!

John McCrea

[Dave deBronkart]

To me the core issue at the root of all this is your third bullet: is Facebook really open if it won't let you take your data with you?

Twenty years ago Adobe cried crocodile tears when their faux "openness" about PostScript stopped hard at the Type 1 font format, which was the only real way to make PostScript viable: without Type 1, PS was too slow, and no clone was allowed to use it. The crocodile tears came when Microsoft and Apple responded by ganging up to create the Royal font format, which went on to be called TrueType. Suddenly it was clear that nobody would really need Adobe fonts anymore, Type 1 or not. Immediately Adobe announced that it would publish the Type 1 format.

Now Google (and many others, including Plaxo) have responded to Facebook's proprietary format by introducing OpenSocial, and there's an initiative to develop a standard (open) format for interchange of contact info.

On the other hand, Plaxo either flubbed it (as Scoble said) or is being very aggressive, perhaps with Big Goog at its back. I dunno. I just resist anyone's efforts to lock me in - ESPECIALLY when they're touting their openness. Whether Adobe or Facebook, let all such parties continue to be hoisted by their own petard.

[Mark Waks]

It was pretty much inevitable, although I'm really kind of impressed at Plaxo for forcing the issue so visibly: using Scoble as a test case was brilliant, whether they intended it or not.

*Eventually*, I'm pretty confident that Facebook is going to lose this fight, and lose badly. In the long run, social networks are almost certain to become commodities: that's what the users want, and there is no technical barrier to it. The network effects will slow things down, but as Friendster discovered, social networks are not forever. As Facebook becomes less trendy and more mainstream, there is plenty of room for new, cooler networks to supplant it at the young end.

My wife and I were reminiscing yesterday about how much this feels like the old days of email. Now, as then, the big players are trying to create walled gardens that don't play any more than they absolutely must with the outside world. I'm pretty confident that now, as then, it will be to their detriment, and the ones that are slowest to react as things open up will be the biggest losers. (How many people even really remember Prodigy any more?)

It's not going to be fast, at least not in Internet Time: my guess is that it'll take a few years for this to fully play out. But first they'll be forced to admit that user data belongs to the users, and can be exported to other systems. And then they'll be forced into inter-compatibility, with networks smearing across sites. Both are features that users will be increasingly demanding, and there are plenty of smaller, hungrier companies that will be happy to supply them if the big ones don't.

Besides, even if the social networks don't supply inter-compatibility, their applications will do so. These sites are really nothing more than aggregations of bite-sized applications, and while the sites may have no motivation to share their networks, the apps certainly do. If Facebook is at all smart, they will realize that they are in the app business, and the way to win is to be the best there, rather than blowing their efforts trying to lock users into the network...