What I was using to hit Facebook
Well, I guess you’ve probably heard the latest in the ongoing egofest that is Robert Scoble. To cut a long story short for those not in the know, Robert used an automated script to scrape data from Facebook, the social networking site. This (top secret) script had been provided by Plaxo, another company involved with social networking sites. Surprise suprise, Robert gets rumbled and has his Facebook account removed. Does Robert accept that he broke Facebooks’ Term of Service and having his account removed was fair punishment? hahahahahahahahaha! Not when there’s pages of self promoting blogroll to be written….
The main problem I and a few others have with this is that Robert seems to think that breaking Facebooks’ ToS is fine and that he should be allowed to take ‘his’ data whereever he likes. Why does he want this data? (names, email address and birthdays apparently) Could it be that he’s trying to create his own mailing list? If he wants to contact these people then why not simply use the built in features of Facebook? Robert has often mentioned that he will accept anyone as his friend on Facebook, and this probably holds true in real life as well, and so I suspect that there’s a fair percentage of his 5,000 friends than are simply fanboys that have signed up, simply to have Robert as one of their friends. All rather teenage if you ask me. The point though is that did Robert ask permission of these 5,000 people if he could use there data outside of Facebook and 3rd party applications? It doesn’t appear so.
I think this video by Loren Feldman from 1938 Media sums it up nicely…