The Robert Scoble vs. Facebook saga is me thinks a taste of some of what is to come in the year and even years ahead. Its the old silo-race rearing its ugly little head again. Basically Facebook is saying you’re allowed to use ‘your’ accounts information as long as you do so manually, thus their de-activation of Mr Scoble’s account after he used a bit of software to scrape his friends’ contact details. In the end they own the data and are a little bit jealous of it and there is the matter of the Facebook Terms and Conditions.

(The irony is that there are a few useful little odds and ends floating around that can do a whole lot more than get names and email addies from facebook, the last one I gave a test-drive did all of that plus mine out images and other media and went way beyond mining just facebook :-) the hard part is actually figuring out something useful and worth-the-effort to do with such data)

So of course there is a group to go join – Continue reading →