I hope the government spy databases got the same email from facebook.

scoble you need to get on orkut, all orkut needs is a twitter feed.

if facebook is looking for direction, I would say, keep staying true to your principles, but keep innovating too.

closed vs. portable data? users need a way to have both, maybe facebook1 and facebook2.

scoble is right, we do need a social network that you can crawl.

and while we’re at it we need paper trails for electronic voting, and we need to put Bush in prison within 5 years. Happy 08

Oh, that’s right, there’s billions to be made, aren’t there…

fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

My first reaction was thus: Facebook are evil, really evil. They’re so evil, that somewhere there’s a demon cursing himself for not realising just how far the boundaries of evilness could be stretched, and he might be evil, but boy - he ain’t nowhere near as evil as Facebook.

My second reaction followed: who does Scoble think he is? Just because he wanted to have all of his friends’ contact info in his Outlook. The bastard had 5,000 friends. When I was on Facebook, I had 7! Screw him!

My third, and final, reaction, is: why is it, as a rule-abiding member of Facebook, I can’t get my account deleted, but simply put on hold until I happen to sign back in? Why is it that all of my details are still there, and will be until I jump through a million hoops and then beg and plead for Facebook to remove my account? And yet Scoble, who broke the rules, gets his deleted without even having to ask?

Lucky bastard!

Also interesting to note that Arrington didn’t write this post just in case it upset his friend Zuckerberg. He never writes the posts that might just piss of potentially influential friends.

This story is another example of the A-list bigging each other up. People should instead read Chris Saad, Chris Messina, Steve Ivy, Simon Willison, Brian Suda, Tantek Celik, Mike Kaply, Jeremy Keith, Phil Windley etc. people who actually know what is going on in the internet space and not just reporting on another startup but creating the next generation of technologies. Stuff you won’t read on Techcrunch for another 12 months.

It’s fun to accumulate friends and watch my numbers go up, but I also prefer to have the wall of the platform between some of them. Scraping from my own email contacts is one thing; giving my contact info out to anyone in my online social network is quite another.

Try deleting a message, six months later if it gets a reply, the message comes back!!! Nothing is being deleted, only hidden!!!

These guys are doing the FBI’s job of creating a secret profile on every person in the world, everything they like, what they buy, who they contact!!! It should be made illegal!

Doh! You’re right… my point/theme may be difficult to see completely: I’m attempting (perhaps poorly) to illustrate the current lack of business utility in facebook, when taken as a whole, and how easily I think this could turn.

@52 was attempting to equate current number of facebook users with future success. My counter-point, citing AOL et al., was that large numbers of users/customers today doesn’t guarantee anything.

if facebook can convert all those ’searching-for-hotties’ users into long-term paying customers (of anything), they’ll be around a long time.

OMG. I got an unsolicitied email. I feel so violated. Must write blog about it. OMG. I can’t screen scape email data in violation of TOS. Must protest. OMG, screen scraping data leads to more spam. Must protest more that bad company allowed this despite me earlier protests.

the decisions-makers (read that: money-spenders) are definitely plugged into the bloggers. In an attempt to gauge where/how/if to spend money on anything tech-related, these blogs are used as a barometer. (I’ve seen this in two big name-brand companies over the past 24 months; sorry won’t name ‘em.) If this begins to sway ‘anti-facebook’, ad dollar-spends on facebook will drop and it will be measurable.

I ultimately make up my own mind, but I’ll readily admit that I’m influenced by bloggers like Paul Kedrosky, Seth Godin, Brad Feld, Anil Dash, Guy K… and on the rare occasion, even Scoble.

His data-mining & subsequent ban has (for me at least) simply provided another point to support my existing position. (”I must be right” mentality, I’ll admit)

Facebook will likely be supplanted, but it won’t be because they didn’t bend to the will of the uber-geek. Until there is somewhere better to take your data to, I don’t see the average FB user asking for openness. Marc Canter may well be a jolly fellow, but he has little in common with that 19 year old hottie with the 1000 pictures on her profile that every dude on FB is trying to Poke.

I’m one of the developers of FriendCSV, the first app to push the edges of data portability inside Facebook, and something seems amiss with this Scoble/Plaxo story.

He’s claiming that all this script was doing was doing a query and attempting to match up Plaxo contacts with FB names, and then syncing it all together in an offline format. The thing is that there is NO reason that anyone would need to run any type of script/scrape to do this — the Platform itself would allow this and be perfectly legitimate through an application. Here anyone could make the call for the appropriate data, and then the matching script could (should) take place offline or on another server.

There would be zero problem if this was done through an application. There’s zero reason to have scripts and to do any profile scraping here.

The proof is that with FriendCSV, we now allow people to match their Gmail contacts to their FB friends, and thereby sync things up as closely as possible.

So either the Plaxo developers simply jumped the gun and didn’t know they could do this through the Platform…or they are up to something more than simply matching names.