One of the big stories in the tech world this week was a showdown between controversial blogger Robert Scoble and Facebook. You can read this article to get a fairly balanced recap of the drama, or browse through Blogrunner’s aggregation of posts and articles. (On a side note, I just discovered Blogrunner and it may be the coolest thing I’ve found all week).
But the gist is this: Scoble was alpha testing a program being developed by Plaxo (a forerunner of social networks as we know them today) called Plaxo Pulse. The particular feature he was testing was a script which logged onto his Facebook account, and then rapidly browsed through his friends, profile-by-profile, collecting — or, “scraping” — their names, birthdays, and e-mail addresses. (For more on scraping, see this recent article in Wired). This data was to be imported into Plaxo to help populate a user’s address book there. Facebook picked up on the superhuman speed at which the profiles were being accessed, and promptly deactivated Scoble’s account while notifying him he had violated Facebook’s Terms of Use.
Most of the heavyweights have weighed in on the matter: Arrington, Battelle, Carr, Fake Steve, Hansell, O’Hear, and of course Scoble himself has a few things to say. And they’re not all singing the same tune.
