scoble

It’s interesting to read the interplay between Scoble and Andreesen from yesterday about how Google’s new Friend Connect stacks up against Ning and, by extension, other build-your-own social networks.

If I actually understand Friend Connect correctly, and I probably don’t, it’s not really designed to replace the creation of social networking features even in corporate environments. We’ve talk to various potential clients about creating social networks of their own, and often a lot of the value (from a business standpoint) comes from owning the platform underneath.

Which is the opposite of what Friend Connect does.

Friend connect essentially extends the footprint of existing OpenSocial networks, much in line with the data portability steps that are going on at MySpace and Facebook.

So installing Friend Connect widgets on your corporate site instead of using a Ning or custom-grown or white-label social networking solution is basically ceding your business network to one of the existing players. I don’t think that will be an attractive solution to many companies.

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Last night Facebook disabled Robert Scoble’s account for violating the terms of service. Specifically, they disabled it because they detected page view activity that was consistent with an automated script.

Scoble posted the actual e-mail that he got from Facebook, so you can read it if you’re curious.

For a lot of people, getting sandboxed by Facebook is really bad news for them. It might hurt their business. It might kill a lot of their social interaction. For Robert, getting sandboxed by Facebook is bad news for Facebook, because that big fat elephant that was lurking in the back of their office—you know, the one about who owns your contacts?—has now been dramatically pushed to the forefront of the discussion.

Guess what: you don’t own the contacts you have in Facebook. You can’t take them with you.

Robert was disabled for using a beta Plaxo Pulse feature that pulls your contact data from Facebook and links it up with your Outlook. Which is, stupidly, against the Facebook Terms of Service.

Robert’s planning to do a live broadcast today at 2pm (pacific) to answer all sorts of questions about Facebook and Plaxo. I’m also looking forward to picking his brain at our CES party next week

The bottom line is, everything goes in to Facebook, and nothing comes out. It is a black hole. Which is dumb, because Facebook is based on your input. There are only a few things where, if I put stuff in, I never expect to get them back out. The stock market, for example. (Oh, Zing!)

On Twitter, Andru Edwards, Teresa, myself, and others are having a cool discussion about the validity of Facebook’s ToS. Worth following (start from the bottom):

dbrowell @TeteSagehen , IMHO, I feel that I should b in control of my privacy, not Scobel; not FB either, which is why Beacon made people mad, right? 7 minutes ago from web in reply to TeteSagehen

AndruEdwards Facebook has a TOS. If you agree to it, use it. If you don’t agree, then don’t use it. It’s that simple! Don’t agree and then break it. 10 minutes ago from twitterrific

AndruEdwards @jasonp107 - so that you can contact me off of facebook, not so you can scrape all my facebook data out of it. 11 minutes ago from twitterrific in reply to jasonp107

jasonp107 @AndruEdwards then why do you list your e-mail address in FB? That’s a totally external piece of information… less than 10 seconds ago from web in reply to AndruEdwards

AndruEdwards @jasonp107 - yes, you get what info i provide ON and WITHIN Facebook. That is what i agreed to. 5 minutes ago from twitterrific in reply to jasonp107

jasonp107 @AndruEdwards I get your point on privacy, but I feel like friending on FB = you get whatever contact info I provide 7 minutes ago from Snitter in reply to AndruEdwards

AndruEdwards @TeteSagehen - it was his data he wanted. it was his friends data. I didnt agree to that when i joined facebook. 17 minutes ago from twitterrific in reply to TeteSagehen

AndruEdwards @TeteSagehen - it’s not lame to block someone who violates TOS! 20 minutes ago from twitterrific in reply to TeteSagehen

trishussey @TeteSagehen but there are ways to do it w/o breaking the TOS http://urltea.com/2gpp -would you want FB to allow screenscraping for info? 22 minutes ago from twhirl in reply to TeteSagehen

TeteSagehen But really, it’s just that their TOS is shortsighted. If they claim a monopoly on my relationships, it makes me less likely to use the site. 25 minutes ago from twitterrific

TeteSagehen @trishussey and @jspepper it’s DUMB that they won’t let you suck things out of Facebook. Other sites do. Also, he’s Robert *effing* Scoble. 26 minutes ago from twitterrific in reply to trishussey

trishussey @TeteSagehen is it though? He did break the TOS. Plaxo is complicit, IMHO. Maybe it should be lesson for all of us. We can’t break the rules 30 minutes ago from twhirl in reply to TeteSagehen

TeteSagehen Facebook is going to be royally fucked if they don’t let @scobleizer back on the site. INCREDIBLY lame that they blocked him. 44 minutes ago from twitterrific

[ Update: Scoble's FB profile just came back online ]

Surfing the top of TechMeme right now (yes, Scoble, I read it too) is a post from Om about new Comscore stats showing a dip in Facebook traffic for the month of September.

Here’s one of the graphs from Om’s post:

Let me preface this by saying that I’m the guy who never uses 1 and 10 on a scale from one to ten. I’m not usually prone to extremes.

I think we’re going from 10 to 1 on Facebook here. All you have to do is read Om’s post, Scoble’s post, and to a certain extent Joshua’s post to see some of this “OMG Facebook explain yourself!!!” sentiment.

Let’s avoid the swing from “Facebook is the best thing ever,” to “Facebook traffic dipped, it’s dead.” Because the truth is that neither statement is accurate.

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According to Robert Scoble, Facebook launches new features every Tuesday. This morning, they launched a new feature that shows how many mutual friends we have when you request my friendship. As our speaker Rodney Rumford writes:

This might seem like a very small change, but it makes a huge difference to me & millions of other facebook users. Now when you see a friend request, you can instantly see how many common friends you have. With 1 click you can see which mutual friends you have. This small change greatly enhances usability. This makes it very efficient for determining if you run in the same circles. It is also a way to separate out people that run in a circle where you care not to associate yourself.

In the past, when I received a friend request, I usually wanted to see a message from the person showing how we knew one another. Requests that came in without messages were usually seen as more suspicious. I investigated the requesters — and our mutual friends — before accepting the request.

Now, Facebook provides me with that information right within the friend request notification. I still like context, to be sure. Notes are just polite, especially if you’ve never met in real life. But if I have 40 friends in common with someone, it now seems less necessary to do a whole lot of poking around before accepting a friend request.

It’s funny that Teresa decided to say that Scoble “uses his Facebook as a hub for all of his content,” because I dropped this post title into the bottomless bin of post drafts yesterday morning having every intention of probably never writing it.

But I can’t sit idly by while she mentions in passing one of the most important aspects of Facebook.

I called in to The Mediasphere yesterday, where I unoriginally called Facebook a “platform,” meaning that it is the place on the web from which I access and use many of the social tools I’m keyed in to.

I Twitter mostly from Facebook. I browse through the blogosphere using the Google Reader app and Blog Friends.

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