What I was using to hit Facebook — unreleased Plaxo Pulse
OK, so I’ve been released from my NDA. I was alpha testing an upcoming feature of Plaxo Pulse — this feature has not yet been released and now that my account has gotten shut down it’s not clear whether it will be released. It is a Facebook importer that works just like any other address book importer.
What does it collect?
Names and email address and birthday.
Why those? Because it’s trying to connect Facebook names with names in its database.
For instance, it learned that of the 5,000 people in my Facebook account about 1,800 were already on Plaxo.
It did NOT look at anything else. Just this stuff, no social graph data. No personal information.
Why do this?
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.
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:35 am
That’s not ironic, that’s just retarded.
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:35 am
Are you still going to seek reinstatement on FB?
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:36 am
Wow. Big fan of Plaxo so am amazed this would cause a fuss.
BTW, was able to download (not synch) with the Fb app FriendsCSV THEN will synch with Plaxo (after the import into Outlook). Ya, a lot of steps, but has worked.
One piece MISSING from the app though.. no e-mail address.
The disruption continues… ;-)
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:36 am
You said, “No personal information” but what do you consider
Names and email address and birthday?
Is that NOT personal?
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:36 am
As a Plaxo user myself I can see the benefits of doing this. Facebook should bite the bullet and open up, after all as you say they are quite happy to harvest data in other systems. Maybe the other systems should shut Facebook out of the loop.
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:38 am
mobasoft: in Facebook this is information is open to your friends. I’m thinking about data like what books you read, or what music you listen to, or who you are dating, etc.
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:39 am
“…harvest data in other systems.”
So, that’s going to be the demise of Open Web
Eventually, all the kids on the playground get into a fight -
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:40 am
[...] of Facebook data (relevant posts: Facebook disabled my account, Unintended advantages, and What I was using…) in the past day and (of course) found the results to be less than ideal. I have a feeling that [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:41 am
[...] Scoble’s post here for more. Tagged N/A VentureBeat [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:42 am
Does that mean Robert that you successfully got your info out and were then banned. Or did it stop somewhere between the 1800 and the 5000?
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:48 am
We got most of it.
Actually we don’t think we were caught by the script itself. But we think another blogger sold me out. :-)
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:49 am
the facebook paradox in action.
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:49 am
Plaxo was literally going to run this service for me this morning — they told me how useful it [was] for you. Then I woke up to see today’s news.
Not sure if I’m going to run it or not….
I understand Facebook’s position, but I sure would like all my friends’ contact info in one place.
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:49 am
One reason I have always been so insisting with Xing to be downloadable is exactly what you said - you want the data in the system you want, not where somebody else wants you. Which is why I was very happy that they did come back with an export contact data button.
And if everything fails, you just pay somebody oversees to type it in manually, you will get your data.
Because let’s face it: I always will have data which is not in the systems by personal effort plus not all data will be in those systems.
Plaxo is the least of all evils at the moment for syncing (thought they did screw up most of my contacts and got rid of the mail address - hu?), and it allows me to take the data with me on my mobile phone.
As long as facebook is not giving the data, we will just get it somewhere else, basta. Deal with it, or just go back to being insignificant for that usage.
Will have a look at FriendsCSV now. :)
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:52 am
[...] a quick update: Scoble was testing an upcoming feature of Plaxo Pulse that imports friend data from facebook into [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:57 am
Ditto to Mobasoft. The average Facebook user does not want Mr. Scoble to scrape data, any data, away from Facebook.
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:59 am
That would be a great feature for Plaxo! I hope Facebook sees the light.
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:01 am
addendum to my previous comment, it would also cause me to trust my data more on facebook, right now I only log in once a month or so often, I sign into Plaxo daily.
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:01 am
Is this going to help rase the price in the sale of Plaxo?
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:03 am
1. Plaxo’s on the block so what does this do for them?
2. That’s FB’s get out of jail and get Scoble back in card. They can always say something like: “Oh well if that’s all you’re trying to do then that’s OK.”
3. having nibbled at that one then it becomes a full assault on all your/my social graph data?
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:04 am
BarbaraKB: that’s bullshit. Data gets scraped out of Facebook all the time by applications and other things.
Also, why can Facebook import from GMail? Those users didn’t give permission for THEIR info to be taken off of Gmail.
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:05 am
Funny… Friends CSV doesn’t seem to be available in the search results listing anymore.
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:07 am
Facebook scrapes data off of the public web: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/16-01/ff_scraping?currentPage=3
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:08 am
They probably wouldn’t have noticed if you didn’t have 5000 friends ;)
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:09 am
Robert, do you think this is more about FaceBook being concerned about letting go of “their” data or more concerned about resource hogging from scripts and screen-scraping?
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:11 am
Angella, you can find it here
http://apps.facebook.com/friendcsv/
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:11 am
Except for your own User Content, you may not upload or republish Site Content on any Internet, Intranet or Extranet site or incorporate the information in any other database or compilation, and any other use of the Site Content is strictly prohibited. Such license is subject to these Terms of Use and does not include use of any data mining, robots or similar data gathering or extraction methods. Any use of the Site or the Site Content other than as specifically authorized herein, without the prior written permission of Company, is strictly prohibited and will terminate the license granted herein.
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:11 am
[...] post here for more. Tagged N/A VentureBeat [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:15 am
I have read all over the web on this issue that you seemed to have started, and it is funny that people say that the data isnt yours or you cant screen scrape it. How about this, you manually look at all the data and write it down on paper. Or enter it into excel. Or even better, you have 50 people do it for you, throughout the day, thats all they do is grab your data out for you. Is that against the TOS? Since you didnt use a “automated” script? Think about it that way, and I think that facebook needs to chill.. for the same arguments they had themselves about the newsfeed when they released it - “all the data is there already, you just need to look”, well , same if you want to take it with you in your head, excel, or wherever - just look :)
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:16 am
Don’t forget that not everyone likes or trusts Plaxo. While I like it personally, I’ve had people who’ve asked me to remove them from my address book on there, because they don’t want their data on those kinds of services.
And no where in the user agreement for Facebook does it say you’re consenting to allowing you data to be automatically scraped and put into another service. With services which have long had APIs to let you access their data - Google and the like - this isn’t an issue.
If Facebook turned around and said it was allowing third-party services to access my data on there, it would be extending the terms of service in exactly the same way that Google was criticised for doing with Reader. Personally, I wouldn’t mind - but other people might.
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:18 am
Hey All. I’m one of the developers behind FriendCSV, the first Facebook app that exported an individual’s full friend’s list. The app is still there and running fine and we had numerous talks with FB and there was not a single problem with that.
So the thing is that whatever Plaxo Pulse was running (as a script) was actually unnecessary. There’s absolutely no need to run a script when you can just have a separate application that makes a call for all of your friends’ data. The “matching” with Plaxo contacts can then happen on Plaxo’s server, and sent to the individual. So in short it looks like Plaxo just didn’t realize that they could get these data w/o violating TOS.
If they were actually going a step further and scraping pages and trying to do some OCR on the e-mail addresses, then it’s more of an issue.
But right now, with FriendCSV, if you have a gmail account, we facilitate the exact same matching that Scoble was talking about, and thousands of people have used this app without problem.
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:18 am
“How about this, you manually look at all the data and write it down on paper. ”
Except that when you sign up to Facebook, you know that no one in the real world is actually going to do that for 4999 friends - so there’s a clear expectation that data isn’t going to scraped en masse.
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:20 am
@Steve yeah - but look at it this way.
People used to bitch because they had to enter each contact record one at a time - then they wanted automated tools so that they could point to their address books and save them the hassle of entering manually.
Now, it’s come full circle, and because people decided that they now want to take their data someplace else, they are starting to complain again.
face it - people are never going to be happy with anything that is available
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:20 am
no one in the real world? if you really wanted the data you would do it, or use something like amazon’s mechanical turk, crowdsourcing…
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:23 am
“[...] It’s ironic that you can import your Gmail address book into Facebook but you can’t export back out [...]”
Well, actually you CAN, in fact you were doing it.
Only, it is not ALLOWED by their TOS…
as Nicole already commented: “[...] And if everything fails, you just pay somebody oversees to type it in manually, you will get your data [...]”
In fact, I wonder how they are going to detect THAT.
But it is always that way: when technology can’t really stop it, then TOS and policies and ultimately laywers get involved….
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:26 am
There is a facebook app called friendsCSV that will auto export all your friends’ data to a csv file and will email it to you…I tried it out a few months back and the only thing it doesnt scrape is email addresses which is what I really wanted but there is something preventing it from doing so…
maybe facebook will wake up and smell the fresh air of open-ness someday
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:26 am
Rock On Scoble!!
It’s the Users that Create the Value to these Social Networking Sites! Facebook isn’t Valued @ $15 Billion for the Crap Site it is thass fer darn sure*
It’s the Eyeballs Stoopid!
;))
I wouldn’t mind Running that Script on Flickr to not only get my 7,000 Contacts outta there but my 35,000 Photos + 40,000 Faves + 100,000 Comments + over 5 Million Views!!
Cheers!! ;))
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:26 am
I believe email address on Facebook should be protected from other users, even friends. If easily and quickly retrievable, we’re back to massive spamming problem again.
Personally I wouldnt want “friends” on facebook to easily save my data such as post/wall/address/phone number etc onto their hard disk…it just make things easier for stalkers..god know how many stalkers there are on campus already.
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:29 am
@Steve It’s not whether it’s possible that matters. Wait enough time, and anything’s possible. What matters is the expectation of the person who owns the data - which, let’s not forget, is NOT Robert but each of his friends. When they gave Robert access to their data, did they expect it to be taken wholesale and put into another service? That’s something which is against the ToS of Facebook and, therefore, they probably didn’t.
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:31 am
well then they should be pissed it was put wholesale into his head (aka - another service) - since he can see it!
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:33 am
By exporting this data you’re removing individual Facebook users rights to retrospectively restrict access to such information. Facebook and other sites provide the controls to allow users to determine which information is visible by others. Once you’ve exported this information those users no longer have that level of control over their data and they’ve no idea what you might use it for.
I’m all for there being a way for people to reuse their information with other sites but this seems to be driving that reuse from the wrong angle. Ideally Facebook would provide an export interface and only those who had given permission to export their data would appear in the output. In the absence of this though I’m not sure you’re right to scrape their pages anyway.
As mentioned by others the data your harvesting is actually pretty sensitive. One could argue that people shouldn’t make this information public within their profile but people don’t always realise they’ve done this or realise the implications of doing so - particularly when they’re new to such a site.
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:34 am
No, Scoble…whats ironic is just a few months ago you blogged this…
“Same with Facebook. I’m not moving away from it. Why? I have 5,000 reasons why (and another 500 already who want to be included in my Facebook network).”
http://scobleizer.com/2007/10/02/steve-ballmer-still-doesnt-understand-social-networking/
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:35 am
[...] his blog, Scoble mentioned he was using a unidentified software (Update: Scoble identified the software as that of Plaxo) to transfer his social graph or contacts to other places. [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:40 am
when i entered my private information (including email address and birthday) into facebook, it was under the assumption that it would stay there. :)
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:40 am
@Dan Birdwhistell
Plaxo WAS using OCR to scrape these email addresses. I just wrote about that here (sorry to link-spam in the comment section, Scoble):
http://venturebeat.com/2008/01/03/i-was-about-to-get-my-friends-email-addresses-out-of-facebook/
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:52 am
[...] latest fiasco surrounds Robert Scoble, one of the better tech writers out there (in my opinion). He was using Plaxo Pulse, a service that attempts to solve a small part of the information diaspora problem by [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:59 am
[...] any more, has been blocked from Facebook for trying to download his social graph. Apparently he ran a script provided to him by Plaxo that was aimed at connecting the two worlds together. All it did was gather the name, email, and [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:59 am
[...] to Mathew Ingram to Robert’s own post that started it all, the story was that Robert had knowingly run an automated script that scrapped all his data from his Facebook account. In the process he got caught with his hands [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:59 am
Actually we don’t think we were caught by the script itself. But we think another blogger sold me out. :-)
And thereby hangs a tale. Shall I make popcorn?
This has an interesting implication. It suggests that your Amish shunning at Facebook resulted not from hitting an automated tripwire — which seems more reasonable; computers multiply inefficiency as well as efficiency — but rather that your account was pulled by a HUMAN BEING.
Which seems all kinds of inexplicably stupid.
Hel-lo, he has maxed out the number of friends, lots of activity on his account, name “Scoble” seems vaguely familiar — don’t you think you’d maybe want to escalate that one up to Zuckerberg-level before pulling the plug?
No?
Someone at Facebook doesn’t understand the way social networks work In Real Life.
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:59 am
Just got my CSV file sent to me interesting but on a similar basis you might want to check out the Facebook Foaf (Friend of a Friend) Generator available here:
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~mrowe/foafgenerator.html
There is a lot of history behind Foaf as an open standard vocabulary for expressing metadata about people, and their interests, relationships and activities. http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:03 am
If Facebook made it easy for apps to extract my email address, home address and birthday wouldn’t that make it Heaven on Earth for identity thieves?
There are people on my Facebook friend’s list I barely know who asked me to add them because they read my blog or are fans of software I’ve written. Should they now be able to extract my phone number, birthday, home address, email, education history, etc into “Random Web 2.0 Wannabe Social Network” because of this relationship? As a Facebook user, my answer is NO.
More thoughts at http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/01/03/FacebookRightScobleWrongSocialNetworkInteroperabilityAndTheOReillySocialGraphFOOCamp.aspx
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:05 am
Scoble kicked out from Facebook
Blogging celebrity Robert Scoble has been kicked out from Facebook today.Using his own words “I could call people idiots for not understanding the meaning of the…” Facebook terms of use, that disall…
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:10 am
Plaxo sounds like something I might want to use on my teeth. Do 4 out of 5 dentists recommend?
Scoble, what’s important, is that we will always be friends *in our hearts* whether you can’t fit me on Facebook because there’s a limit, or because Twitter is down, or because they booted you from Second Life, and *we’ll always have Kyte.TV*.
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:12 am
@Eric Eldon. Well that is just silly, then; there’s no reason they had to do any OCR to scrape e-mail addresses. Instead, they should have just exported the full list of names and birthdays, and then matched those against Scoble’s Plaxo list. The app could then easily flag duplicates or conflicts for the user to quickly review.
But I’m glad someone tried it. FB has been allowing users to scrape App data for a LONG time, but someone definitely needed to make the OCR move to test the limits.
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:14 am
Once you’ve exported this information those users no longer have that level of control over their data and they’ve no idea what you might use it for.
First off, this is like saying that once you’ve given your girlfriend your phone number, you have no way of taking it back once you break up. She still knows your number! You can’t, like, force her to get amnesia or have a lobotomy! O the horror!
Presumably if you hand out information to people you trust, you trust them enough to not misuse the information later? Or should Facebook stop referring to your contacts as “friends,” and instead call them “random strangers who might abuse the information I give them at some point in the future?”
Second, it’s not like you can’t accomplish the same thing BY HAND, reading all the information off the web page and typing it into Outlook. You are still able to “export information” out of Facebook; it’s just not especially feasible to do it that way for 5,000 “friends.” If you have 10 friends, there’s nothing stopping you. In effect, Facebook is penalizing you for being a bigger user/having a larger network.
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:18 am
[...] Scoble describes it: “…it’s trying to connect Facebook names with names in [Plaxo’s] [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:23 am
My money says you’ll get your facebook account back within a week, but I’d be interested to see what happens!
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:23 am
Karim - No you can’t expect her to forget it but I think you can reasonably expect that she won’t publish it publically elsewhere for other people you don’t know to see it. Also once that information is published elsewhere you no longer have the ability to restrict it’s access to only those friends that have seen it to date.
I think Dare’s comment (and blog post) sums up my thoughts much more accurately.
Data can always be extracted by hand but it’s obviously somewhat more time consuming and discourages mass abuse of data.
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:26 am
You’d think but isn’t that exactly what Scoble is doing? I’m sure some of the people in his friends list didn’t imagine he’d do this with their data.
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:26 am
Scoble breaks Facebook TOS in Robin Hood data portability effort
I like Robert Scoble’s most recent fight with Facebook over data portability that led to his account being disabled but don’t like how he went about starting it.
Scraping without permission is wrong. Sorry, yes, even scraping your own da…
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:35 am
Should they now be able to extract my phone number, birthday, home address, email, education history, etc into “Random Web 2.0 Wannabe Social Network” because of this relationship? As a Facebook user, my answer is NO.
Well, they can already do this NOW. They just have to do it “by hand” instead of using a script.
It isn’t a question of whether it’s possible to extract this information out of Facebook, so much as whether you can AUTOMATE the extraction.
Facebook has made extracting the information artificially inefficient. It’s a kind of “regressive tax,” if you will: the more friends you have, the more you use Facebook, the more onerous the task of extracting the information.
Namaste. Peace out. Free Scoble’s Data. ;-)
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:36 am
I just tried FriendsCSV: Worked like a charm. Now let’s connect on PPulse!
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:38 am
Imagine they join open Id and some other company comes along, clones Facebook, and they offer you 10 bucks. What would you do?
I bet a huge portion of Facebook’s members would take the 10 bucks, move to another network, buy some songs on iTunes with the money and never look back!
That’s what venture capital will be used for.
$ 10 million gives you 1 million members in maybe as little as 30 days!
And let’s say every member has 20 friends.
= 21 million members
Cost of one member: $ 0.48
Those members log in let’s say 50 times a year and they look at 2 pages.
That’s over 2 billion page views!
CPM : $ 15
That’s 30 million a year!
And when you don’t care about the profits in your first year on the market, well then, offer those 1 million members $ 30 !
Perhaps it’s not that easy but I’m sure you get the picture of where this might end up going for Facebook.
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:39 am
OK, new term:
** Scobleicious **
The press and attention Plaxo and Scoble are getting from his being Scobled (waxed, vaporized, disabled abruptly and without warning) is * scoble-icious!! *
:-)
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:47 am
[...] Scoble wants to export his friends and sync up with plaxo. Here is how he could have done [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:51 am
I dont appreciate you scraping my email address and handing it to plaxo Robert. They spanned a previous address of mine to high hell
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:53 am
*spammed
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Plaxo ‘used’ Robert.
He probably didn’t mind because it could benefit him (and it did - lots of traffic to his site), but what if FB takes this to court?
Don’t get me wrong, I applaud what he did, but at the very least Plaxo should take up the responsibility and pay Robert’s bills in case it goes wrong.
I bet they didn’t make him any promises whatsoever.
All this is bad publicity for Facebook, and it would get worse if they took it one step further, but the way I see it this ain’t good news for Plaxo.
They support open ID which is good, but in a way they used Robert.
Now I know this ain’t unusual in the corporate world, but if that’s what they stand for then I guess it’s time for some good alternatives!
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:14 pm
If you were to retrieve my birthday from Facebook you would find I was born somewhere around 1900.
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Last week, I used a different company’s beta Facebook scraper. It worked and didn’t get me booted off the site — but I don’t have a very long list of friends on Facebook, so it probably just didn’t do enough requests to set off the scraper alarm.
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:19 pm
[...] For instance, it learned that of the 5,000 people in my Facebook account about 1,800 were already on Plaxo. Source: What I was using to hit Facebook — unreleased Plaxo Pulse « Scobleizer — Tech geek … [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Also, why can Facebook import from GMail? Those users didn’t give permission for THEIR info to be taken off of Gmail.
How do you figure? When they (foolishly) give FB their Gmail password, they are giving FB permission to take their Gmail info.
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:22 pm
This is SO BAD, that i’m almost considering dumping facebook. The gall that they have to think that they are some kind of utility. The gall they have not to play fairly on an open field…
It’s bullshit to think that because I’m doing a thing one way instead of the other (oh, this HTTP GET is somehow different from the other HTTP GET) that I’m having some kind of adverse effect on the servers.
The fact that someone is my friend IS MY INFORMATION, just like the fact that I have someone in my gmail address book is a fact. I want to exploit these facts to my benefit in as open a way as possible. This means that i want to share this information with the other tools that I use.
Does anyone really care HOW I ACCOMPLISH THIS?
Facebook certainly was not able to detect Robert’s use of this technology, unless his script presented itself with a new USER_AGENT, geekdave wonders if the USER_AGENT of the script was other than Mozilla (ie).
Even given that, I’d love to see the log analysis system that they have. I bet they wouldn’t even detect the 1800 requests that were made from plaxo on behalf of Robert…
Scoble, I hope that FB bucks up, and gives you your contact information, and as much history as possible. I hope you then ditch facebook - I’ll follow and go somewhere that’s a bit more open and permissive.
Thanks, and best of luck.
@geekdave
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:23 pm
[...] ja: Was war der Grund? Der Top-Blogger und Netzwerker Robert Scoble wollte wissen, welche seiner 5.000 Kontakte auch im Konkurrenznetzwerk Plaxo zu finden sind. So etwas geht den [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:23 pm
[...] then Robert decided he’d use a new unreleased tool from Plaxo to get the data on all 5000 people connected to him AND their email addresses too. Name, location, [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:26 pm
This is probably where Facebook will start to run into issues. Checking the Plaxo site, they now can pull from MySpace, Windows Live Spaces, LiveJournal, etc. If they don’t correct their limitations and watch what their doing, they’ll continue to lose “customers”.
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:27 pm
all Plaxo Pulse needs to do now is put a “timing” mechanism on their Facebook “scraper” so that it will not be identified as a bot. :)
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:30 pm
I support the campaign to get him his facebook account back however I have to wonder why he chose his live account to use to test out some new software?
perhaps a test account set up purely for that purpose or if they wanted to stress test it with larger numbers of members i’m certain that via his many friends etc he could have created a new profile just for that purpose ;-)
He also reviewed the T&C’s before and noted that scripts weren’t allowed yet chose to carry on. He was playing with fire to start with.
Get him his account back but be more careful next time ;-)
In instances like this a “sorry” probably wouldn’t go amiss in appeasing the facebook owners. nothing wrong with being humble especially as he did run a script which is not allowed
testing on a live account and with live data…..
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:32 pm
[...] Scoble’s account was deleted from Facebook for using an automated contact information script by Plaxo. Mike says that Plaxo’s wrong here by violating Facebook’s TOS and scraping data into [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:33 pm
I love the whole controvesy over people taking names, email addresses and dates of birth.
My Name and my DOB is registered with the local Birth, Deaths and Marriages Registrar and is available to anyone researching their genealogy.
My Email address is usually everywhere somehow and the ones that are really private have never been posted in public. ( its not that hard really )
Want to know where I have worked or where I might work? You can Google my name.
I got elected as a Parish Councillor. As part of that process I had to register my interests. In fact we expect public officials to make all their “interests” and financial dealings available to public scrutiny. It will be out there long after I leave my office.
But heres the real point. If this aggregation leads to a de - duplication of records in plaxo and facebook and a correction to current data then count me IN.
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:34 pm
i just posted about this on my blog- the issue of data rights for your friends is a huge topic - certainly will be a huge topic for the next week…
http://www.centernetworks.com/whose-data-is-it-on-a-social-network
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Robert,
I am (was?) one of your “Facebook Friends.” (Though, if you have 5,000 of them, it’s stretching the definition of “friendship” into “mild acquaintanceship.)
I am, therefore, given you permission to use MY data (not yours, MINE) on the Facebook site.
Personally, I’m not fussed whether you want to store it on the Facebook server, or on Plaxo Pulse, or for that matter chiseled into a brick on your house (along with 4,999 other bricks) as a piece of “installation art.” [1]
That having been said, I can understand how some Facebook users might be happier in a walled garden, and therefore UNHAPPY that THEIR data got scraped out.
Mark in West Sussex, England [2]
[1] If you do this, and win a major art award, I want an invite to the prize ceremony :-)
[2] I think my location IS significant. We have a very different “social norm” of privacy information in Europe compared to the US. Many things that are common in the US would be criminal offences in the UK!
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:44 pm
Still finding it impossible to care.
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:46 pm
No you can’t expect her to forget it but I think you can reasonably expect that she won’t publish it publically elsewhere for other people you don’t know to see it.
Had many girlfriends, Ed?
I kid, I kid! :-)
Also once that information is published elsewhere you no longer have the ability to restrict it’s access to only those friends that have seen it to date.
I guess I’m just puzzling over why Facebook should work any different than Real Life? You give your business card to someone, guess what, you “no longer have the ability to restrict” that information. It’s gone. Free, as in buh-bye. You can’t turn around later and ask for the business card back. You don’t want someone to have the information, you don’t trust them? Then don’t give them your card, don’t make them your friend.
You want to give your card to someone you don’t trust? Then don’t put any non-public information on your card. Leave off your birthday, SSN, Visa card number and underwear size.
People seem to be treating Facebook as some kind of system where 5,000 people can know your birthday one day, but if you change your mind later, you can “revoke” the information and make those 5,000 people forget when you were born. Alas, the toothpaste does NOT go back in the tube. Facebook is a bag what formerly held a cat.
You’d think but isn’t that exactly what Scoble is doing? I’m sure some of the people in his friends list didn’t imagine he’d do this with their data.
Do what, exactly? Make a copy of it?
“OMG I gave someone my phone number and they had the nerve to make a copy of it! Yeah! They actually wrote it down in TWO places! They typed it into Outlook AND wrote it down on a Post-It Note! Yeah! And the Post-It Note didn’t even have a password!”
I don’t know what Scoble is doing with his Facebook data, but presumably if I trusted him enough to give him my information, I trust him enough to not do something completely EVIL with it?
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Doesn’t it make sense that there’s a foul play in there? with Plaxo guys expecting facebook to act against that, and take advantage of the angry mob “blogosphere” expected reaction to bitch-slap facebook around for reasons of un-openness.
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:54 pm
[...] you finally get told by scoble that he was released from his NDA and this is the product that was being used. We all know that scoble and not ijustine is in fact the internet, but I mean [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:55 pm
@Ed Eliot -
“Karim - No you can’t expect her to forget it but I think you can reasonably expect that she won’t publish it publically elsewhere for other people you don’t know to see it.”
You obviously aren’t familiar with the endless supply of “Pics of My Ex-Gf” porn sites around. :) Obviously, your “reasonable” expectation just doesn’t hold water in reality (especially when talking about the demographic using FB and MySpace).
The short answer is this - users publishing sensitive information on social networks are still naive to think that their information is somehow “protected”. The reality is that once it is published even in a limited public form one must assume that it can be leaked to those who you do not want to have this information. Users will greatly benefit from changing their thinking about what information they should readily make available to “friends”.
January 3rd, 2008 at 12:57 pm
“Plaxo WAS using OCR to scrape these email addresses.”
Times 5000? I would have kicked your butt off, too.
Next time use one of the applications that seem to know how to do this right.
This isn’t a facebook issue. This was about the application you used. But it sure got you in Techmeme, didn’t it?
January 3rd, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Not related to Facebook, but to Plaxo. I was surprised a couple of weeks ago to see Plaxo reminding me of the birthday of a former co-worker. This person was not, and probably never will be, a Plaxo user, but her birthday was harvested when I ran Plaxo against my Outlook contacts.
This got me to wondering what Plaxo would do with all of the information it harvests.
I haven’t investigated Plaxo much, but does it let you get your information out of Plaxo? And what else does Plaxo do with the information?
These information ownership issues are getting VERY interesting.
January 3rd, 2008 at 1:06 pm
No, but I’ve been happily married for a few years now. I’m hoping my wife won’t plaster my email addresses and telephone numbers everywhere. ;-)
I see your points Karim but I think the issue isn’t about whether or not your data will get distributed minimally (in manual form) by some users but that making it easy to bulk extract data makes it more likely it’ll be abused.
I think in Scoble’s case it’s the fact that he bulk uploaded it to another service and I doubt that’s something many would be happy with. They might be happy with Scoble’s individual use of their data but can he ensure that Plaxo won’t abuse that data.
January 3rd, 2008 at 1:15 pm
I don’t mind if Scoble/Plaxo/the Internet scrapes my name and birthdate since I put it there and that’s the part that’s always viewable by the public. People can opt not to put in a birthdate easily.
There is a thingie you check off not to have Facebook Googleized though, and I wonder at what point that thing kicks in.
But all the other stuff of Facebook, the guts of Facebook, like the vampire bites, the videos, the graffiti on the walls, the books reviewed — that shouldn’t be able to be ported out because it’s content that the author makes.
The copyright of a letter belongs to the author. Isn’t it kind of like a letter?
So are we saying here that it’s ok to individually upload and download stuff but not in batches of 5,000? Well, Scoble isn’t going to spam people with Viagra ads in their various social media services but you can’t expect everyone who tries to port that many names to be as scrupulous.
January 3rd, 2008 at 1:17 pm
From my perspective, it took me long enough to accept “friends” requests in facebook from people who aren’t really “friends”, if you catch what I mean. I used linkedin for profession contacts, and facebook for friends from high school/college/”my 20s”.
I still ignore Plaxo requests that come to me via email (I never got over their initial launch tactics), so having the information about myself that I entered into Facebook never making it’s way into Plaxo is an important Facebook feature.
January 3rd, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Guess Facebook isn’t such a great “Rolodex” after all. Say what you want about the monkeys in Redmond but that Outlook Address Book seems pretty “open” now, doesn’t it?
January 3rd, 2008 at 1:33 pm
So technically you were violating facebook’s draconian, non-social terms of use by scraping data from their servers.
Sure, the faceborg might give you your account back but how is that fair to others who had accounts shut down for legitimate scraping?
January 3rd, 2008 at 1:33 pm
[...] might add — and put them into their damned spam machine. Scoble’s doing to loud public crying act over this but I agree with Mike that Plaxo is wrong and Facebook is right. I want Facebook to [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Before people talk about, whether its facebook’s duty to protect user info or the user’s right to choose what is private, they need to understand how easy it is today to scrap a site.
I am not even talking about dapper.net (for the non programmer). All you have to do is watch the java and python mailing lists and irc channels to get a sense of the level of scraping going on. Its getting ridiculously easy to write complex scrap(p?)ers.
There is no such thing as private data on the internet…ask Bush if you don’t believe me.
January 3rd, 2008 at 1:43 pm
[...] glad that Scoble was banned by Facebook for violating FBs TOS by running a scraping app from Plaxo. You can scream at the top of your lungs that it’s your data, but that’s not the case. [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:01 pm
Times 5000? I would have kicked your butt off, too.
Um, ’cause 5,000 is a really big number to a computer? Facebook’s TOS says users must not use the site in a way that could “damage, disable, overburden or impair the Site,” but they don’t tell you precisely what volume of HTTP GET requests over what period of time will cause the Turbo 386 under Zuckerberg’s desk to burst into flames.
Instead of figuring out how to throttle excessive requests on their end, they’d rather tell their users they’re not allowed to make “too many” requests — whatever that is.
So are we saying here that it’s ok to individually upload and download stuff but not in batches of 5,000?
Apparently! There is a mysterious line, somewhere between viewing ONE page and viewing 5,000 pages that, once stepped over, results in your becoming a Facebook Unperson.
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:04 pm
[...] of it. He basically says that Facebook is ok to block accessing it using a script, in response to Robert Scoble being banned… It is my data, since the people i know gave it to me!! If I want it in my outlook - it is my [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:11 pm
[...] was using a script (since revealed to be a product called Plaxo Pulse, which Plaxo has had ‘top bloggers’ testing for [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:15 pm
The Scoble Curse remains rock solid, amazingly so…talks up Facebook, then Beacon and then Plaxo ScrapeGate. Talks up Apple, then Leopardgate and broken MacBookgate. Talks up Longhorn then delayed Vistagate. Talks up Seagate then Free Agentgate. Talks up Xbox 360, then billion-dollar recall-gate. Talks up Tablets SPOT, UMPC-Origami, and then zilchgate. Talks up HD-DVD, and then scandalgate. Talks up Second Life, and wastelandgate. Talks up Kindle, and kindle firewoodgate.
If I was a Marketer, based on the historical track record, once the belly-laugh Scoble comes at you with the shaky cams, offering free media coverage, don’t bite, as it’s not ‘free’, not in any sense of the word, it will cost you dearly in terms of the ‘curse’.
A few points…
1. Your DATA? Who made it YOURS? If I become a “friend” that gives anyone (Plaxo/Scoble/Spammers) the right to cull my data? I think not. Facebook is right.
2. If you want a controllable PIM, use Outlook or ilk. Not some privacy-invading advertiser network, oh sorry “social software”, that slaps a TOS on every move. Reap what sow.
3. Plaxo doesn’t exactly have a good rep. here, having spammed me to death with ‘update’ requests in the past. Why should they need to match my Name, Email and Birthday with Facebook data anyways? Even if people have both accounts, maybe they don’t want to be compatibility matched.
I hereby dub this Plaxo Scrapegate.
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:19 pm
That’s great. You’ll get a virtually unused email address and a birthday showing me to be about 95 years old. My real friends know how to get ahold of me and when my birthday is. My facebook friends don’t need to know that.
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:32 pm
It appears Facebook is scared of Plaxo (and any other similar network). If all the information is transferable between networks, then there is nothing locking users in to their network. They should concentrate on improving their product so that people don’t want to leave Facebook, rather than trying to corral people into a closed network. This is very similar to the way cellular providers fought local number portability. Competition is good for the consumer and good for innovation, but it’s bad for lazy companies that are resting on their reputations.
If users are that concerned about privacy, they should not join any social networks. Once your info is out there, it’s like trying to get your pee out of a pool…
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:35 pm
I love your blog but am sick to death reading about facebook - it may be the 2nd coming of christ per your books - but pls move on or atleast report other things :)
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:40 pm
As one of the “Scoble 5000″ I would contend that my birthday is mine, not Scoble’s. I object to my birthday being handed over to Plaxo, which I well remember as every goon I met seemed to spam with some request associated with Plaxo. I’ve heard they’ve changed, but Plaxo would take a long time to gain my trust. I trust my friends not to hand my email over to spammers. I think Scoble crossed line.
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Perhaps this explains why Facebook aren’t yet using microformats; particularly hCard?
(hCard: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard)
After all, if you can move your friends’ addresses elsewhere, how are FB going to make money putting adverts in front of you?
[Aside: My Facebook profile has my DoB, mobile number and home address; I only add people as friends on FB if I'd be willing to give them that data in real life.]
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:46 pm
Here’s what we learned kids:
Scoble scraping = good.
Beacon scraping = bad.
Why is it that the privacy people who crowed about Beacon aren’t furious at Scoble?
If it wasn’t that big of deal to take this, why not do an opt-in? How do I know Scoble won’t lose my data? Sell it? lose it to someone who will sell it?
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Where did you learn the definition of “ironic”? Alanis Morissette? :)
That’s called “strategic” … I call it “evil”…
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Every identity theft warning about Facebook includes hiding your birthday either completely or making it friends only. Now those who did the latter need to worry that someone more malicious than Scoble will even lift it from there.
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Off topic:
Shelly from burningbird.net (commenter upthread), your website crashes safari, and firefox on a mac.
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:53 pm
Coulter,
dont forget Scoble hiring you:
Coultergate.
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:55 pm
[...] Banking Security is still a Pain and Friend Data Breaches Horror scenario: Plaxo using Scoble’s address book to harvest data from Facebook. –Simon Phipps in [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:56 pm
[...] See What I was using to hit Facebook — unreleased Plaxo Pulse [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:59 pm
[...] out of Facebook and put it into their Outlook address book, for example. So why am I annoyed that Scoble did it? Because 1) he’s not a real life friend and 2) he didn’t ask [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 2:59 pm
[...] has been no lack of commentary [ Mulley | Alexia | Nick | Dare ] on Robert Scoble’s use of an unreleased data scraper tool to mine his friends’ personal information from Facebook, and his subsequent explusion from [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Facebook? More like StingyBook with data it grabs from other open sites:
http://cogdogblog.com/2007/11/18/stingybook/
Anyone can scrape away at my FB profile; they will find obvious lies on my birthdate (Apr 1), that I graduated in 1935 with a PhD from Harvard, and I was once a CEO of a large software company before that Bill guy came on board.
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Out of curiousity, do you (Scoble) have access to the privacy policy that covers Plaxo’s retention and use of the data gathered through this feature?
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:13 pm
[...] instance should you be able to extract your friends’ contact info out of Facebook? Blogger Robert Scoble, who tried to use a small script supplied by Plaxo to export out friends’ emails (all 5,000 [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:15 pm
[...] Given the issue with Scoble trying to extract his friend data and put it in Plaxo, I went back and deleted all my friends, applications, everything. If I’m [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:29 pm
[...] was indeed running an automated script as he explains in a post today, testing an as yet unreleased feature of Plaxo Pulse that scrapes Facebook pages for content like [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:43 pm
[...] blocaire Robert Scoble, així com les seves dades. El motiu és que Scoble havia aconseguit “arrencar” informació dels seus contactes de Facebook, violant d’aquesta manera les condicions [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:46 pm
[...] het je haast niet ontgaan zijn dat Robert Scoble’s Facebook account is geblokkeerd omdat hij middels een nog niet vrijgegeven script van Plaxo had geprobeerd de mailadressen van zijn 5000 [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:53 pm
[...] for eksport af egne data. Mere hos Dave Winer og … ja, Scoble. Scoble anvendte benbart et ikke-endnu-releaset produkt fra Plaxo, som simpelthen scraper Facebook for sine venners navne, emails og fdselsdage! Ser vist [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 3:54 pm
“It’s ironic that you can import your Gmail address book into Facebook but you can’t export back out.”
I don’t think Irony has anything to do with it. What it is is unethical. Just about everything Microsoft vends works this way too, except in cases where extreme user pressure or legal pressure has been applied.
If users held the companies they used to any kind of ethical standard the world would be a better place, and companies such as Facebook would either change or go out of business. In Facebook;s case I hope it is the latter.
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:17 pm
To Steve regarding my site: Thanks for indirect note. I just checked my site with Firefox 2 and 3, Safari 3, and Opera 9, using Mac (Tiger, not Leopard), and I didn’t have a problem.
Can you email me more details? shelleyp@burningbird.ndet.
Oh, and Robert: don’t enter that into Plaxo. Oh that’s right: I’m not one of your friends. Not nice enough.
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Oops, typo. That’s .net not .ndet.
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:19 pm
Bail is set high at Facebook. Doc Searls recently noted that these sites are still a walled garden . . . somebody’s private space. Unfortunately, they aren’t OUR space, we are just renters in a huge development that has a boatload of private security guards that aren’t willing (or maybe not able) to share the rules with us.
I was in the manual friending mode and got bumped . . . wasn’t the point “making” friends?
http://carterfsmith.blogspot.com/2008/01/how-to-get-kicked-off-facebook-personal.html
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Why is it that the privacy people who crowed about Beacon aren’t furious at Scoble?
Because there’s a difference between Facebook, WITHOUT YOUR PERMISSION, informing all your friends that you just bought a crate of extra-strength Depends and rented a copy of “Brokeback Mountain” for the 12th time this year…
…and one of your friends making a copy of an email address YOU ALREADY ALLOWED HIM TO SEE.
I know, subtle difference, right?
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Mac Beach,
If Google want to block Facebook scraping their site, let Google do so… and we can all make a decision whether to carry on using GMail.
If Facebook want to block others scraping their site, let Facebook do so… and we can all make a decision whether to carry on using Facebook.
You may not like Facebook’s terms of service…
- You have a right not to like them.
- You have a right not to use Facebook.
- You have a right to wish that Facebook would go out of business if you want :-)
- What NO-ONE has a right to do is extract data out of it and give it out to a company I’ve chosen not to do business with.
I don’t care whether the company is Amazon and the mechanism Beacon… or whether the company is Plaxo and the mechanism Facebook.
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:47 pm
I tried using Plaxo Pulse’s Facbook feature about a week ago, it didn’t work. i guess that’s a good thing otherwise i may have been cut too. I just wonder why my didn’t work?
Also, why should i not be able to pull this information off, it is available to me anyway. if i had a million hours in a day I could just go through each friend and re-type all this information into my apple address book or wherever i want, why not just make it a little nicer and easier for me?
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:57 pm
[...] your contacts from Facebook. Robert Scoble, the popular sillicon valley blogger, supposedly had his Facebook account de-activated for running Plaxo’s tool and violating Facebook’s terms of service. His account has [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 5:27 pm
This is why I don’t want Scoble to be part of my social network…
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:04 pm
[...] #2: Scoble revealed what he was up to on Facebook: he was testing a new feature on Plaxo Pulse along with other bloggers and journalists (one of which he seems to suspect of alerting Facebook, [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 7:47 pm
this is crazy. And the fact that you have 1800 “friends.” I will be following your blog more closely. It should be interesting.
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:12 pm
[...] is what Robert Scoble was doing - utilizing a new Plaxo util which scraped Facebook and exported Robert’s friends list email add…. Well what happened was that Facebook suspended Robert’s account - only to turn it back on [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:35 pm
[...] gets kicked off Facebook for violating their TOS. Stupid walled garden. Turns out he was trying to export his FB contacts to Outlook. This entry was posted on at 10:33 pm and filed under url. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:53 pm
[...] was Scoble guilty of? Trying to export contacts to Plaxo Pulse - hardly a crime considering Facebook allows users to [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:03 pm
[...] What I was using to hit Facebook — unreleased Plaxo Pulse [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:03 pm
dont forget Scoble hiring you: Coultergate
Good point, it was in the cards (I needed the $), but being Podtech, it went well beyond just the usual Scoble Curse. But water over the bridge now.
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:08 pm
You’d be lucky to have 1 friend
January 3rd, 2008 at 9:26 pm
Scoble’s said in the past that his facebook “friends” are a who’s who of the Tech Industry http://scobleizer.com/2007/12/11/steal-my-content-please/
Debatable, but let’s assume it is. Imagine how valuable that could be to some spammers, direct marketing firms, or any one else in the industry. Point is, it can be gathered very quickly, and then sold or passed on. Sure Scoble my have your email and birthday and could certainly manually move it to Outlook or Plaxo, but I rather doubt he would take the time to it with “5000 friends”. The point here is, while I may have implicitly given Scoble this data, I didn’t given him permission to do whatever he wants with it. I think there is an assumption, right or wrong, that this information will stay within the facebook garden and people won’t be running tools to harvest it to be used or sold.
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:14 pm
[...] tej nowej funkcjonalności, lecz w trakcie pobierania danych o kontaktach jego konto zostało automatycznie zablokowane. Scoble ma w Facebook 5000 kontaktów, więc trochę odsłon skrypt Plaxo wygenerował. Facebook [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:45 pm
[...] כל זה למד על בשרו הבלוגר רוברט סקובל, שחשבונו נחסם לאחר שהריץ סקריפט של Plaxo Pulse, המיועד לבדוק מי מחבריו ב-Facebook נמצאים גם ב-Pulse ולהתחבר [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 10:55 pm
One point that I don’t see clearly pointed out: *Your* Facebook friends email address information, is *not* Facebook data. This data belongs to your friends. As they’ve chosen to allow *you* to have access to that data, why are *you* not able to compile that information into Outlook via Plaxo? One more reason to abandon Facebook.
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:00 pm
[...] encountered the “dark” side of the social networking phenomena. Robert was running a script to extract his list of “friends” from Facebook so he could use that information for his own purposes. One might think that this would be quite [...]
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:01 pm
Who in the hell has 5,000 friends? Can it be anything but self-serving to gather that many “friends” on any network? If you agreed to be Robert’s friend without really knowing Robert and without really being his friend, then you are a stupid sheep and deserve to have Robert scrape your data and share it with his real friends, the people with whom he had an NDA. And if you were a real friend of Robert, you probably already knew he’d yank your information and give it to some other network and you wouldn’t have cared one whit. So all you whiners can just shut your pie hole. You deserved what you got. Now go suck up to some other “famous” blogger. It will make you feel important every time you see your name on his “friends” list with the 4,999 others there. And of course, in the interests of full disclosure, I’ve only written this post to get a link from Scoble’s site back to my horribly neglected blog. Thanks, Robert for giving me the backlink. -Tyler
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:26 pm
[...] was he running on his Facebook account. According to him, he’s testing a new service called Plaxo Pulse. It is a Facebook importer that pulls and collects names, emails and birthday