Scoble blocked from Facebook

Scoble got kicked out of Facebook for using a new service that would let him export his contacts and connections out of Facebook? Like, to make his own data portable? And they kicked him out? That’s awesome. What a good fight to pick. Go Scoble.

I wonder how Valleywag will nail him for this one.

Regardless, way to go Scoble!

A small Israeli blog has already published this before.

I’m surprised you haven’t noticed it.

Here is a link to the article on the blog

http://www.israel-on-blog.com/.....al-network

facebook’s getting lamer by the second.

Who else but Robert could push their buttons and get this noticed! Good job Scoble. Stay tuned to PodTech for more on this

scoble should be on cnn…

Scoble blocked! For once peace and quiet on my FB feed!

~ Marcus

Scoble needs to broadcast himself 24/7 through this whole thing via his cell phone, live, on Qik.com. His view rates will be huge.

Scoble taking calls, Scoble having a morning scotch while figuring out how to take advantage of this, Scoble getting free pizzas delivered by fans cheering him on, Scoble in front of Facebook headquarters wearing a mascot disguise (something like the Philly Fanatic), or live tours, maybe start at the original Harvard dorm where Zuckerberg came up with Facebook. He could shout “I could use a friend, I just lost 4,999 …. “

Scoble would be much more bearable if he didn’t insist on using puke-inducing phrases like “move my social graph” all the time. You just want to export your contacts, stop using pretentious buzzwords!
Oh, and by the way, the only thing more obnoxious than using your perceived “importance” and contacting Facebook PR is to be patronizing enough openly state you’re “Just gonna try to be an everyday person about this.” (actual Twitter quote!). Oh mighty, important Scoble! How thankful we are that you are stepping down from your throne to rub shoulders with us, the unwashed masses…

There goes the valuation

http://www.centernetworks.com/.....n-facebook

Scoble did something that was against the TOS , what did he expect facebook to do ?

He deserves to be banned for life. He accepted the Facebook TOS when he signed up so should stick to them.

It annoys me that people sign up for things and then decide to fuck with things. If he doesnt like Facebook or their TOS then stop using Facebook , simple.

The guy sounds like a douchbag .

I am not aware about viewing pages at a quick enough rate will cause suspension. I will use dial-connection to access facebook, lol.

What can he explain anyway after he has broken the sites rule.Take a new account and make it from the beginning.Of course he can bring it to the top again.Can’t he…???

Krishna: I won’t start a new account on Facebook. By the way, that too is against the rules there.

Instead I’ll be spending more of my time on one of the other social networks that a) doesn’t have a stupid technical limitation that keeps me under 5,000 friends and b) lets me keep my own social graph (er, social network info) to use wherever I want.

Facebook is a pile of shit, and there TOS sounds like a fuck up aswel

go Scoble, you don’t need that FACECRAP rubbish

…no one cares.

Marshall,
I think this was a good move for Robert to do this. “Like, to make his own data portable”… a worthy cause.

By the way. All traces of him on facebook have disappeared…and there is now a group that sprouted up to reinstate his account.

Full details & screenshot here. Cheers!

http://facereviews.com/2008/01.....rt-scoble/

Justice should be equal to all… no matters weather you are big blogger (online million earner) or even a common man.

Gr8 work FaceBook.

I salute your automated scripts.

Instead of scraping the information with a script - why not *ask* Facebook for the data, or request a feature to allow the data to be exported. (That’s what you’re supposed to do with roach-motel type sites).

With over 5000 ‘friends’ of course a script hitting every page one after the other without a break is going to be red flagged.

A properly written script would pause between page requests - at least a minute. How much time was the script pausing between requests?

From the facebook notification, its the volume of requests that’s the root of the problem, not a disagreement on whether the data should be portable or not.

I imagine this was automated and its interesting to know they are monitoring this stuff.

what I don’t understand is why didn’t they use a facebook app to query his friend list and export it that way.

As much as I despise facebook I think they have a point. If you are making that many requests you are placing a large load on their servers with the slight possibility of forcing some downtime. What would make a poorly written script any different from a DDOS attack?

We are considering a cross-promotion with the makers of Robert’s script. Hope to clear up any concerns regarding its “spiritual appropriateness” later today.

Are you sure that isn’t Phillip Seymour Hoffman?

A new year and the same Facebook crap?

I’d just put a few “sleep()” into that script.

pwned.

Seriously though, I understand why people support data portability but is it an issue that’s important to Facebook’s consumerist user base?

A couple thoughts…

1. Lots of “information wants to be free” posts. But there’s a difference between the information itself - which you know in your head - and the application holding it - Facebook. Facebook is not a PDA utility.

2. This publicity will probably spur Facebook to make a change in members’ ability to do exactly what Scoble tried. It could be done in a way that makes FB even stronger ultimately.

I understand that Scoble does not agree with the TOS, but I do not understand why he thinks Facebook is wrong in enforcing it. It seems to me that Scoble should try to convince them that they are wrong and that they should change it. If he just ignores it with the hope he will get away with breaking the rules to which he agreed, what right is there to complain when he gets caught?

Scoble is annoying and irritating. I think Facebook did the right thing. He is clearly abusing the TOS and disturbing the peace.

Steven, #30: how do you know I haven’t asked Facebook to change? In fact, I signed a Bill of Rights for Social Web users: http://opensocialweb.org/

Second, I was pretty sure I would get caught.

Third, I have hundreds of hours invested in Facebook. All gone.

So, I’ve paid a penalty of thousands of dollars of my time to try to make a point. Got it yet?

why would you spend hundreds of your hours on facebook ??

its pretty sad .

Just what I have been wishing for, a high profile Net personality to get jacked up by a proprietary social network. Need a few more like this for dataportability.org to get traction ( Oh and lets drag Microformats along with us! ).

Hypocrisy..

So it is ok for facebook to ask for my Gmail, Hotmail, etc. usernames and passwords so that they can reach into those accounts and import contacts, but its not ok for another service to do the same to them?

Being able to export contact information is totally ridiculous. Who needs that when Facebook has sheep-throwing?

If it would be President Bush on facebook running same script I would treat him queal to some other user. If he broke their law & policy, why would he be able to get his account back?

So does that mean facebook is not treating every1 equal?

Robert, #32: Thank you for such a quick response. I am impressed!

If the hope was to get away with something (even if the expectation was that you would not) then the action troubles me. If the idea is that this is like an act of civil disobedience, I can understand that.

I have no issue with you, personally. I do not question your contribution to Facebook. However, is your argument that you should be allowed to decide for yourself that you are exception? I find the theory more interesting than the specifics. The questions that I see are: who gets to make the rules? who gets to decide when they apply and when there are exceptions? who gets to enforce the rules? what alternatives are legitimate for those who want whatever is offered but object to the constraints?

Scoble you cheater!!!

Is that how you got your Wordpress blog so popular through automated scripts???

haha

My apologies for getting too wrapped up in this. I will drop it after this.

I found Thoreau’s discussion in Civil Disobedience (http://thoreau.eserver.org/civil2.html) interesting. He is, of course, referring to the government and forced actions, not to private businesses and optional actions.

[2] How can a man be satisfied to entertain an opinion merely, and enjoy it? Is there any enjoyment in it, if his opinion is that he is aggrieved? If you are cheated out of a single dollar by your neighbor, you do not rest satisfied with knowing that you are cheated, or with saying that you are cheated, or even with petitioning him to pay you your due; but you take effectual steps at once to obtain the full amount, and see that you are never cheated again. Action from principle — the perception and the performance of right — changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was. It not only divides states and churches, it divides families; ay, it divides the individual, separating the diabolical in him from the divine.

[3] Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide for reform?

And if you’d like to see what Scoble would look like as a revolutionary check out:
http://uk.techcrunch.com/2008/.....-contacts/

LOL I love how it’s a “cause” or something now… so stupid. Tech nerds and their overinflated egos will never fail to amuse me.

Scoble,

You were spending hundreds of hours on facebook? Hope your New Year’s resolution is one of the following.

Getting a Life… or
Find a Real Friend… or even better
Stop Superficializing

Scripting has been a no no since the Web 1.0 days because it becomes disruptive and a resource hog. eBay sued a couple companies years ago for this reason. Not much thought has been given to this by many of the posters here. Scoble used a script get his graph but a similar script could be used to harvest information for more nefarious purposes. And then of course there are spammers. Scripts are frowned upon for good reason.

Scoble is in volation of FB TOS so they booted him. I used to be a software developer in the 80s and if someone did this to Apple or Microsoft they would be banned for life as well. It’s not about little coding hacks here and there to save time. Instead Scoble went for the FB core jewels of their platform.

He should be banned for life. Facebook needs to set an example.

Oh yeah Scoble isn’t a developer. He’s a PR hound. This is like the guy who gets dared by his friends…”it’s ok Scobie go in there and ask the bank teller for all the money in the draw….and oh wave this gun around..it will help”…

Someone once said you claim stupidity as an excuse…”sorry officer I didn’t mean to rob the bank…my friends dared me ..duh…”

Scoble is an idiot - He knows how to get attention. Pulling down your pants certainly gets traffic. Nice work Robert Scoble. Bloggers everywhere should be embarrassed.

Steven: I was not expecting to get away with it.

I feel as though I should know scoble since i keep refering to him as scoble.

Firstly maybe its a good thing that you were banned , if you spend hundreds of hours on facebook. Get out and talk to your friends / call them , email them / IM them .

Aren’t nerds comical - one minute your nobody the next lots of kids sucking your knee caps. In a few years time when blogs and web2.0 personalities are out of the window then these nerdy celebs will go back in the shadows.

What ever happened to celebrating nerds who created something like apple , google , amazon etc rather than writers ?? what has a writer ever really contributed to society ??

Hey Robert, et al.

This is about the data, not TOS. There’s an anti-facebook undercurrent developing that is being openly expressed by the alpha-geeks on twitter. I’ve been saying the same thing for a while now. Twice in the past 24 hours, two people have told me that they have either stopped using facebook completely, or that they are “…burned out on facebook”.

Right or wrong, many, many people pay attention and take their cue from these bloggers. I agree that a lotta users may be reluctant to abandon the time they’ve spent on facebook, but in the end you gotta see some ROI - what has all this really provided to the average user in terms of measurable advantage in business? A big advantage is in access to (and thus analysis of) the data.

If there isn’t business value, then what? Status updates? One word: twitter.

If facebook’s utility to the alpha-tech can be so easily replaced by twitter (as has occurred to me and I suspect is occurring to Hugh McLeod [as one example] as well), then facebook better quickly figure out how to remain relevant to them.

Because when the alpha-geeks say ‘I don’t use facebook’, people will hear ‘Don’t use facebook’.

[this is a near-verbatim reposting of my reply to kara at boomtown]

What’s news here Mike? Oh - it’s Scoble. OK then. C’mon, this has been FBs policy for a LONG time. Nothing new there.

I would imagine that its just a PR stunt for Facebook. Any pr is good PR. Not that they need it.

Developers are moving to FB why? 60 million reasons. The problem is that without a coherent developer strategy FB is doomed. Scoble is a tool and facebook knows it. They don’t care about Scoble. They should care about the company that paid Scoble to do this.

@52 - old school: please see my post at #49.

If this continues, expect to see a lot of folks quit using facebook. As an analogy to the point I tried to make above, look no further than Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement of Obama. Millions (yes, *millions*) of Americans will consider (and possibly endorse) Obama simply because Oprah does.

No matter your opinion of Scoble, Arrington, McLeod, Tim Bray, (or even me), a whole lotta otherwise tech-savvy folks listen to them. This is an important set of voices for facebook.

60 million reasons? History has not been kind to companies with vast followers but whose grip on them was tenuous: AOL, Compuserve, and Netscape come to mind. Anyone remember Gateway Computer?

#53, John Minnihan: Problem with your analogy is that you assume tech bloggers have the impact that Oprah does. They don’t. How many of the 60mm members actually plug into that whole meme?

Something is amiss here.

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.

@53 AOL, Netscape, Gateway - companies that built nice businesses with mainstream customers but weren’t nimble enough to adapt. Perhaps they same will be said in a decade of Google, Apple, Microsoft, …. Who knows, but their demise will have nothing to do data portabilitiy.

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.

Hey bhc3, thanks.

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)

@55 The Plaxo script used OCR to gather email addresses. VentureBeat has the details. Email address is the key for Plaxo’s matching (no suprise) and also the key for spammers.

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.

#56 - steve: “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.”

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.

Only an idiot would post anything on facebook - they store everything you do and publish your actions to the entire world - even when you set your privacy to the max.

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!

@59 john, agree 100%. I was reacting against the constant refrain in the blogosphere that unless (free) service X does A, B and C (my fickle demands of the day) they are doomed to fail. While the tech blogosphere is filled with smart people and great advice, FB is doing pretty well so far not heeding much of what is written.

One key element that I see missing from most of the malström online about this is simple: using the platform’s server to communicate allows me a degree of separation from a lot of “friends” - people I accept as friends but don’t really know and don’t necessarily want them having my direct contact information. [If they're a real-life friend they probably already have it.] I’ll bet that 19year old hottie with 4999 “friends” agrees with me.

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.

@Dennis (no.50) agree the story is - Scoble only just found out about dataportability.org? What has he been reading the echo chambers of Techcrunch and Techmeme?

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.

This is no bad luck. It can happen

48/tom - I’m sure you meant something else, but I can’t help but point out what a ridiculous statement you made: “what has a writer ever really contributed to society ??”

From http://losfer.com/2008/01/03/s.....-scraping/

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!

Scoble hacking facebook! hmmm

fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

I doubt Scoble, or anyone within the web community could ever cause waves within the Facebook community. I’d say about 99.999999999% of FB users don’t know a thing about the web community, and wouldn’t give a damn.

Scoble already has his own website. Let him run the script in his own site. Facebook, after all, still own his data.

Who cares about FB enforcing their terms of use on Scoble? Do people actually care about this fat dork?

You said it, Jill. So shameful that people give a rat’s ass about Scoble, Facebook, or 99% of what is written about on this site. There’s a whole world outside your digital mindset.

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

disqus comments would be nice on techcrunch.

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

Why does this story show a photo of Philip Seymour Hoffman?