Facebook Makes us all Look Like Suckers
As you may have read elsewhere, Facebook has suspended the account of prominent blogger Robert Scoble because he violated the site’s TOS by running some sort of data harvesting script. Scoble says the script was designed to “move my social graph to other places and that isn’t allowable under Facebook’s terms of service.”
In other words Scoble wanted his data back and got a taste of how Facebook treats your data — it’s their data and you can’t have it.
Facebook has yet to issue any sort of statement, but we suspect its rather clever PR folks will be able to get Scoble his account back and still play the rest of us for suckers (Scoble for his part is following the usual appeal methods and says he won’t resort to taking advantage of his own PR contacts).
Naturally there’s already a Facebook group calling for Scoble’s re-instatement, which is, we suspect, what Facebook was waiting for before making its move. If it’s smart, Facebook will re-instate Scoble’s account and do its usual move of appearing to bow to user pressure since that continues to give users the illusion that they have some control over the site and their data.
But of course much like your privacy is an illusion, your control over Facebook is equally an illusion. Scoble says that when the dust settles he’ll give some more details about the script at which point we suggest you try running it and see where it gets you.
Or you could learn from Scoble and others like David McKellar who built a friend organizer using the Facebook Platform only to see that functionality rolled into the main Facebook feature set without so much as a nod of acknowledgement.
As McKellar mentions in an e-mail to Wired News, “since Facebook is worth $15 billion they could afford to buy out the developers they expropriate [or] alternately they could post a warning of new areas where they plan to expand so developers stay away.”
Or they could simply do what they did — create a closed proprietary system, call it open, wait for enthusiastic developers to come up with some good ideas and then roll them into the core feature set without spending a penny. It’s not a new idea, just ask the folks behind Konfabulator who saw their application’s core functionality appropriated into Apple’s Dashboard app.
So long as we store data in and build applications for closed systems and give up all form of control, what befalls McKellar and Scoble will befall the rest of us as well. As McKellar says, “it appears that social networking is here to stay, I’d like to see an open platform that isn’t controlled by one company.” Wouldn’t we all.
Scoble seem to feel the same way and has thrown his hat behind Data Portability.
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