Scoble’s Slap in the Facebook: Plaxo Data Importer Provokes Facebook’s Wrath
Surely you didn’t actually think Robert Scoble had developed l33t skillz overnight? When the prominent blogger announced that his Facebook account had been turned off he blamed it on a "script." It turns out the "script" that Scoble was running is part of an upcoming feature from Plaxo which would pull all your contact data (name, e-mail and birthday) out of Facebook and into Plaxo Pulse. No hacking, just a private beta feature that Scoble was testing.
Plaxo Pulse already offers the same address import feature for LinkedIn, Gmail and Yahoo Mail, none of whom seem to have a problem with Plaxo’s importers. What makes Facebook look especially hypocritical here is that Facebook uses address book importers to pull in the same data from a number of services like Gmail, Yahoo and others.
In other words, in the Facebook world, your data is welcome to come in, but there’s no going out. It turns out Facebook is a bit like the Hotel California: “we are programmed to receive / You can check-out any time you like / But you can never leave!”
I spoke with Plaxo’s VP of Marketing, John McCrea, this afternoon and he says that, despite the hoopla, the feature is not moving to the back burner. “We’re continuing to get this feature ready for release,” says McCrea. “It remains to be seen whether turning off Scoble is a blanket policy or a knee-jerk reaction.”
Clearly Plaxo is hoping it will turn out to be the latter, but as McCrea says, while Facebook uses the word open a lot, “they’ve been reticent to actually put their money where their mouth is.”
Of course Facebook’s use of the term “open” has always had the hollow ring of a former whore trumpeting the virtues of chastity.
It’s worth noting some of the details in Plaxo’s application; for instance Facebook’s APIs don’t give direct access to your friend’s e-mail addresses, rather it sends back an image which Plaxo then runs through an OCR script to return the actual address (we’d like to see Scoble hack that script up).
Also important to note is that Plaxo isn’t harvesting any data that your friend’s aren’t already sharing. In other words, if your Facebook friends have chosen to hide their e-mail address in their profile, no e-mail would be retrieved - this isn’t an attempt to harvest hidden data, it’s an attempt to take public data that exists on Facebook and pull it out into other places - like your Outlook contacts list.
The real question here is why does a site like LinkedIn welcome Plaxo’s importer while Facebook sees it as a threat to its entire ecosystem? As McCrea says, Facebook, “it’s 2008, time to tear down that wall.” Funny, I feel like we’ve said that before.
Update: There’s a argument that could be made saying that Scoble (or anyone else) doesn’t own the information about his contacts on Facebook (i.e. their names, e-mail etc). However, if you accept that then what is the value of Facebook? After all if Facebook keeps you in touch with your friends, but you have no right to store information about those friends anywhere else (like how to contact them outside Facebook) then that makes Facebook very, very limited.
Another point that some people have mentioned is that Plaxo’s use of OCR tools most likely does violate the Facebook TOS. Indeed, I won’t dispute that because it isn’t the issue. The issue isn’t what Plaxo is doing, the issue is the incredibly restrictive and limiting Facebook TOS.
The final and perhaps most obvious thing to note is that if Facebook simply embraced OpenID, XFN, OAuth and other open social web tools much of this would be a moot point.
Update #2: Scoble’s back. Facebook sent him an e-mail explaining why it had blocked his access to the site (no automated scripts, please) and allowed him back in. Read the e-mail and his reaction on Scoblizer.
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