Scobleizer - Latest Comments in Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

lindahellerhylton — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:38:36 -0000

I have just been disabled on facebook for as near as I can tell inviting to many friends. Can anyone help me get it back. Linda

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

whadafuk — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 13:58:08 -0000

There is reason that I don't use my real name, or photo or post my email address...the people in my friend list know who I am...and if they want this information they can get it in a more private manner.

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

Ian — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:05:48 -0000

@ Scoble: You are right, wrong, and right.

1. Graph - of course this should be open, it is really just a list of the people I know. Why should facebook, or anyone else, be able to say I am allowed to be friends with someone on their site, but not somewhere else.

2. Friends' data - two points here.
First, by friending you and putting my data on Facebook (or whatever other site) I am agreeing to allow you to "use" that data, but not make any of it public to other people... I friended you, not your other friends. Which leads to my second point.
Second, by posting my information on a site that we connect on, it is assumed that I am familiar with how that site functions (i.e. my data is used), implicitly giving you permission to use it IN THAT WAY. However, if you take my personal data elsewhere, I may not know how it is being used and therefore have NOT given you permission to use it in other ways. (Plaxo's spamming issues of the past being an example). *disclaimer - plaxo is much better now.

3. Our actual data - hopefully this is a given. We should have control how of our content, only allowing it to be put where we want it. However, I believe once I have published content somewhere, I should be allowed to pull that content into other locations - do you agree?

Ian
ian-ellis.com

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

amolpatil2k — Fri, 23 May 2008 06:11:02 -0000

Avatars need not be of the animated variety. We can have "proxy" avatars. Proxy avatars are actual people who have granted us either only Read privileges (Piggyback avatars) or Read and Write privileges (Poisoned avatars). Naturally, Poisoined avatars would be even more controversial than Piggyback avatars but only if all these are not declared. If a profile clearly states upfront whether it is Piggybacked or Poisoned or neither, it would not be so controversial. In fact, it might add to the fun if we suspect that the profile we are communicating with has one or more eavesdroppers or maybe even impersonators.

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

John Waterman — Mon, 19 May 2008 01:26:27 -0000

Mike is 100% right...

just because I let a girl hold my hand at the movies doesn't mean I want to let her hold my hand at the pub with the boys, or after my football game, or when I'll trying to court another girl.

Friendships are contextual...just because I give you my email in facebook does not mean you can assume I will want you to have it in another social contex.

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

Sam Hon — Sun, 18 May 2008 11:36:28 -0000

You have managed to explain and dissected data portability into 3 key parts in your post. Thumbs up for Robert! =)

Clearly, FaceBook is in the wrong.

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

Erik Pukinskis — Sun, 18 May 2008 06:05:50 -0000

Robert,

How can you separate the social graph from email addresses (personal data) when the only key we can use to match up profiles across sites is email addresses? How could I import my social graph from Facebook into Orkut without giving Orkut access to my friends' email addresses?

Erik

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

amolpatil2k — Sun, 18 May 2008 00:27:21 -0000

@maxgladwell
"From a strategic point of view, Facebook’s already lost this war (hard) - it’s just a matter of time until the dynamics inevitably play out."

The Net is like water at worst and grease at best. It WILL flow. It DOES need a container. Google is saying, we don't need to contain it. FaceBook may be making the wrong container. But some container IS needed, for sure.

@brad
http://ideas.4brad.com/data...

Good Man Brad, have you nailed the issue or what? We need more of you around here.

My take is on the issue of abstraction. We are playing with a dirty liquid using our bare hands. We THINK we would be able to soap it off later. Maybe we would, maybe we WON'T. There needs to be some sort of abstraction which allows us to dissociate ourselves from our avatar if things don't pan out as planned. The problem is how to get all the benefits of networking without having to open up fully by having some sort of an "avatar" layer.

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

Chris W. — Sat, 17 May 2008 23:45:23 -0000

Scoble, the sad thing is that 90% of Facebook users will never know anything about Facebook's stubbornness and "walled garden" mentality. Frankly, they don't really care. They just want to connect with their friends on Facebook. Even if you and your 24,000 Twitter followers boycotted Facebook, do you think Facebook would suffer? I would say it's doubtful.

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

Christian Cadeo — Sat, 17 May 2008 22:00:57 -0000

Can we look at this via a libertarian persepctive which is - when you give someone your data, they are free to do whatever they want with it as long as it does not "hurt" you? Hurt can be simple as you gettting spam to something drastic as your privacy being violated.

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

toddsieling — Sat, 17 May 2008 17:12:54 -0000

I felt that Michael was rude and disrespectful towards you, Robert, and that you got played into his sensationalist leanings. After he couldn't pick a fight with Blaine Cook a day earlier, and revealed his shocking lack of understanding of the very development team leader he savaged in an earlier post, he was clearly out for blood and found it in you. I don't think you owed him even an acknowledgement after how he talked to you and about you, but you handled it with class. Sometimes a shower is a great perspective reset.

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

Robert Scoble — Sat, 17 May 2008 14:37:41 -0000

Crawford: I think I was using Irish Spring. :-)

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

Robert Scoble — Sat, 17 May 2008 14:37:09 -0000

Ben: if you hand me a business card a couple of things:

1. If it's me personally I don't hand those over to other people. TO ME a relationship with you is more important than anything else and if I do anything to ruin that relationship I have with you that'll just bring a pox on my business.

BUT:

2. When you hand your business card out you lose all control of what happens with that email address. Sorry, but Arrington and you are totally wrong on this one. You don't have the right to tell me "you can use Outlook but not Gmail." And, yes, you ARE taking a risk that I'll sell your email address to a spammer or do something else that you'd find nasty. I've had people take my email into a public discussion list, which spread my email address beyond people I might care to give my email to. There's also no way for you to control that.

Which is the reason I put my email up on my public blog. I figure that way I don't have to worry about these issues since everyone will have access to my email address and I'll just build systems to separate the good messages from the bad, which isn't hard to do.

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

Crawford — Sat, 17 May 2008 13:04:30 -0000

That musta been one hell of a cleansing shower.
What kind of soap do you use?

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

malatmals — Sat, 17 May 2008 12:14:04 -0000

Just the fact that Facebook hasn't joined OpenSocial (to my knowledge) says it all. I mean if the world unites around a standard, I won't mind typing in my contact info all over again and leaving Facebook behind forever.

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

Alex Hammer — Sat, 17 May 2008 10:31:35 -0000

The larger issue is that Mike Arrington (can be) (an effective) bully, including to his own people (Robert a member of TechCrunch hosted Gillmor Gang)

Link (including Arrington attack on Scoble):
http://techleaders20.blogsp...

Robert is too much of a nice guy to fight fire with fire, and is trying to find other tactics with Arrington, it appears, to get his points across.

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

Ben — Sat, 17 May 2008 08:59:19 -0000

On the second issue, if I've given you my business card, email, whatever, then I've given it to *you alone*. I trust that if you pass that information on, it will only be to those that I might actually wish to communicate with. Otherwise I'll be using rscoble@fastcompany.com any time I need an email address for spam...

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

Joshua Porter — Sat, 17 May 2008 06:59:31 -0000

Here's a question: why aren't we having this argument about Flickr, YouTube, Del.icio.us, etc?

Why are the sites holding objects for us not in the discussion? Well, those sites know their role, providing a tool for us to input our data for our own use. They provide services so that we can connect to others, but I'm in much more control of the data I put there.

Social networks, on the other hand, somehow think they can control that data...while using spin to make it seem like we are in control.

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

M1ke — Sat, 17 May 2008 06:42:32 -0000

I think on that second issue I agree with Arrington - just because my email is there for my friends to look at doesn't mean I want them plastering it anywhere they please, definitely not getting me sent mail from other companies as a result.

Then again, this isn't an issue that's started with Facebook - for years most sites have had options to scan your address book and send invites to all your contacts, even though the address book is even more private than your information in a social network.

The real issue here is one of identity, and connecting your identities to those of people you know - and then attaching certain usage rights to those connections. A differential is needed - I may be friends with people from my forums on Facebook, but I don't want them seeing some photos of me and my family. That's my choice and I shouldn't have it taken away from me just because I use Facebook as a means of contacting people.

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

Eyal — Sat, 17 May 2008 05:42:29 -0000

I'm totally with you on the contact info. If someone thinks that Facebook is a good contact manager he should think again. Rich people would let their assistant copy all that info into their outlook/phone. Other will do it themselves, partially - and all of them would run into issues with unsynchronized information! If facebook had a plug-in to outlook and any phone on the planet - then it might made sense, but as long as this information is managed (and was managed for ages) offline, the call to keep it only in facebook is simply ignoring reality.

So many times I had to log in to facebook to look up someone's new email address or phone number - and each time i manually copied that piece of information to my outlook (so it would be synched to my iphone) so i won't have to go through this inefficient & long process next time i wanna call him. automating it is simply trivial.

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

Mido — Sat, 17 May 2008 05:22:27 -0000

One of the biggest problems for me as a user is having a comprehensive address book . No one has really solved this problem for me yet. I have friends that I for instance mainly communicate over Facebook with (although I have their email address) and some that I just email with. When I want to write my Facebook friends an email I have to go into my account find their email address and paste it into my email client. Wouldn't it be great to have all your friends email addresses and other relevant information on one page (that ideally allows you to email them from there). I think yes.

So my short answer is yes to Scooble: 1 and 2 should be accessible through social data aggregation.

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

Baldo Faieta — Sat, 17 May 2008 04:54:16 -0000

"2. Your friends’ info (IE, their email addresses, their birthdays, their relationship status, their political leanings, their gender, their favorite music and activities, and other stuff you’ll find on, say, Facebook’s profile)."

I think you should be able to take your friend's info that you have access in Facebook, *provided* that is for your eyes only. However, in another system, what guarantees are there for your friend that this is the case.

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

Paulo Jordao — Sat, 17 May 2008 03:16:00 -0000

You guys should know better...
Money controls the world!!!

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

Richard Querin — Sat, 17 May 2008 03:05:34 -0000

Finally someone (Herschel) has put the ball in the right hands. It's the users who must use their own judgment. In this, the stone age of online social tools, you simply don't have the control tools in place. You can 'blue-sky' about it all you want, but right now if you don't want your data shared, mined, or otherwise used by third parties, then simply don't post, share or publish it. Anywhere. As long as you are handing data to third-parties, if you're not happy about it, your only choice is to vote with your feet. And if all the players are 'bad citizens' then tough luck. We'll have to build our own trusted system.

Where the hell was Doc on this call ?? If ever there was a time for the voice of reason, this was it. ;)

ps. MA's concept about someone's business card coming to me with some sort of implicit contract is utter paranoid bullshit. It's up to him to decide who he hands it out to.

Re: Mike Arrington is Right, Facebook is Wrong

SearchEngines — Sat, 17 May 2008 02:34:44 -0000

http://valleywag.com/390494...

Were you kinda hot in the early 90s?