Comment by Isofarro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Isofarro | Hacker News Reader

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IIRC, Scoble was cajoled by Plaxo to run this script against his account under the premise that he could then import all that data into Plaxo. Scoble got caught running this automated script, a violation of the terms and service that he'd previously agreed to. This became a PR issue - I guess this is what Plaxo was hoping for, except Facebook merely reinstated Scoble's account on condition he didn't run that script again (couched in terms of not breaching the T&C again).

Plaxo is nowhere to be seen these days, so I guess the PR backlash against Facebook didn't give Plaxo the boost they needed.

Later on in the Gilmor Gang Scoble defended his actions by suggesting Facebook was just a Rolodex of contacts, and thus he has the right to export all the data of his contacts for his own purposes; pointing out that how is a crawler bot different from him copying over his 5000 contacts into Outlook one at a time (IIRC, Facebook displayed email address as an image on profile pages, so there'd be no paste).

Only today the story has changed that this was really Scoble fighting for the survival of the common web. That's an interesting position to take 4 years later. I don't recall him bringing this justification up before. Perhaps he has in closed networks like Facebook.

If that indeed was the true reason Scoble ran a scraper script against Facebook, then I'm surprised he went through so much trouble to get his Facebook account re-enabled, and then do nothing to safeguard his data against other Facebook reactions to future violations.

Now he's on Google+, and yet this Facebook data still isn't exportable, and I've not seen any complaint from Scoble about not being able to move all his contacts data from Facebook to Google+. I don't recall Scoble using "the common Web" as justification for uprooting from Facebook to Google+, or from moving away from his blog to Google+.

Not sure I approve of this revisionism. If an common Web is important, surely not being dependent on a closed platform is an obvious strategy?

The timing seems strange if you are not following Dave Winer and John Battelle blogs. They both recently talked about Data Lock In and Scoble seems to see it as too little too late. He uses the story to back his position.

My guess is someone pressured him to take a stand and he doesn't want to. Would he have really taken a stand 4 years ago? Probably not, Scoble needs his audience.

>> Now he's on Google+, and yet this Facebook data still isn't exportable, and I've not seen any complaint from Scoble about not being able to move all his contacts data from Facebook to Google+.

Yes, but Scoble explains why he doesn't complain anymore - because the time when it was worth complaining is over, and other tech influencers at that time didn't join Scoble in his fight. Now, I agree with Scoble, that it is just too late - Facebook will simply not allow you to export your social graph, and that's it. You can just waste your time complaining, or delete your account, but that's all you can do.

>- Facebook will simply not allow you to export your social graph, and that's it. You can just waste your time complaining, or delete your account, but that's all you can do.

I'm not sure that's completely true. One could write a browser extension that extracted the data slowly over time and / or use a caching proxy in order to the same thing. I've been digging in to Squid to see how this might be done, but I've just started. Also, for those with smartphones, it seems like the way mobile FB apps integrate with address books might provide another way to backup one's contacts.

Yeah, _you_ can probably do it, but providing a public tool for scraping Facebook (or digging through caches) might be against the terms and conditions, and would probably get the hammer from Facebook counsel.

It's not really revisionism. He says himself he didn't really know what the implications of the whole "walled garden" thing is, when really, everyone did.

I'd believe that his actual motive was to port his contacts to some other network (kind of like how Facebook used to ask for your gmail password so they could spider your mailbox), but there was always a bit of outrage against walled gardens.

In the last 4 years, he probably would have gotten further if he just, I dunno, typed the information he wants to keep into spreadsheet or something.

Sometimes policy fails us inspite of us having capable technology, but tippy-typing with our own little fingers on the keyboard can often work miracles.

It's painful, it sucks, but it gets things done.

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