Ads by TechWords

See your link here
Receive the latest technology news and information.
Networking
Computerworld Daily News (First Look and Wrap-Up)
Computerworld Blogs Newsletter
The Weekly Top 10
Cloud Computing
View all newsletters




Privacy Policy
 

Tech blogger kicked off Facebook for downloading content

Robert Scoble's actions shine a spotlight on data portability within social networks

January 3, 2008 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - The Facebook account of Robert Scoble has been disabled, after the prominent tech blogger tried to download his contacts from the social network, a move that is shining a spotlight on data portability in the Web 2.0 world.

In a blog post on Thursday, Scoble said that he was running a script to move content from his Facebook profile to other places, an action that is not allowed under Facebook's terms of service.

Scoble was using an unreleased feature of Plaxo Pulse,  a social network based on email address books, to import names, email addresses and birthdays from Facebook, he noted  in a subsequent blog post. The tool noted that of Scoble's 5,000 Facebook contacts, 1,800 were already using Plaxo.

"[The importer] did not look at anything else. Just this stuff. No personal information," Scoble wrote. "I wanted to get all my contacts into my Microsoft Outlook address book and hook them up with the Plaxo system, which 1,800 of my friends are already on. It’s ironic that you can import your Gmail address book into Facebook but you can’t export back out."

An e-mail from Facebook's customer service team that Scoble posted on his blog said it had determined that Scoble was "viewing pages at a quick enough rate that we suspect you may be running an automated script."

The note asked Scoble to confirm that he would not "scrape" content from Facebook or attempt to take it in any other way.

Mike Butcher, a blogger with TechCrunch UK, predicted that the portability of data on social networks will be a big issue in 2008.

The disabling of Scoble's Facebook account "will fire the starting gun on all the debates about who owns your data on a social network, debates which -- till now -- have seemed rather theoretical," Butcher said. He suggested that such actions "could even lead to a revolt amongst some Facebook users. The storm that is brewing will not take long to reach Facebook's most senior people."

A Facebook group that formed to protest Scoble being kicked off the social network already had more than 100 members by Thursday morning.

Scoble also noted that the Facebook action prompted him to join a group at DataPortability.org that is working to create standards that will allow users of social networks to port their own content to multiple locations.

In a blog post, Chris Saad, co-founder and CEO of Faraday Media and an organizer of the data portability group, said he welcomed the debate.

"We own our own social graph data -- and we also own all our other data," he wrote in a blog.  "We all know this is just the latest in a long line of problems that are emerging in 2008 and beyond -- so it's great to have the Scobleizer championing the cause for all the standards groups out there. Now with Robert and other great bloggers on our side helping to spread the word ... we have a real chance of helping each of the standards communities get the level of adoption they deserve by putting this all in end-to-end context."



Jump to comments

facebook

Additional Resources

WHITE PAPER
Approximately 60 percent of data migration projects overrun time or budget, while some fail completely. Download this white paper, "Enhancing Your Chance for Successful Data Migration," to learn the critical steps you need to take to execute a data migration project with minimum cost and risk to your business.
WHITE PAPER
Read the Gartner research note to learn why the TCO of a server-based computing deployment used to deliver all applications to users is around 50% lower than that of an unmanaged desktop deployment.
WHITE PAPER
Economic downturns have a tendency to accelerate emerging technologies, boost the adoption of effective solutions, and punish solutions that are not cost competitive or that are out of synch with industry trends. This IDC White Paper presents the results of an IDC survey of 330 companies in Western Europe, Asia/Pacific and the Americas that measures the receptiveness to Linux and takes into consideration changing views driven by the disruptive economic environment that businesses face today.

What People Are Saying

White Papers & Webcasts

Virtualization and Web 2.0
In this era of Web 2.0, Web applications are absolutely mission critical to almost any organization. But these applications are giving IT managers...  

Southern Company
Download Now  

Share our Strength
Download Now  

The Commercialization of ITIL: Lessons Learned
Register for this event today!