Today’s big news is that Robert Scoble’s facebook account was disabled because he used an automated script to "scrape" his facebook contacts. Scoble says that he was alpha testing a new feature of Plaxo Pulse that allows Plaxo users to import contacts from facebook. But Scoble’s violation of the facebook terms of service and subsequent account suspension are merely footnotes of the larger story: data portability.
Who Owns The Data?
When you write a letter in MS Word, who owns the letter? It’s a ridiculous question, isn’t it? Your word processing program is just a tool that allows you to write the letter. Simply using the tool does not grant the tool maker ownership of whatever you create.
When you attend a professional networking event, does the event organizer reserve the right to take away any of the business cards you’ve collected?
If you rent an apartment and hire a moving company to move your belongings to a new building, should the landlord be able to confiscate all your property because it included possessions you acquired while you lived there?
Okay, okay. Calm down. I realize these are not fair comparisons to the Scoble/Facebook issue. The examples above are different. But are they that different?
Why Facebook Has Value
From a business perspective, it is easy to see why facebook would discourage its users from being able to take their data with them.
In her post on the Scoble/Facebook issue, Kara Swisher said:
More to the point, such an ability would be damaging to Facebook’s business plan around building a robust ad business. The success of that squarely relies on people staying and actively using the service because they have committed time and effort in putting up scads of information, photos, videos about themselves on the service, as well as establishing a complex and personally valuable network of friends.
Which got me thinking….does facebook’s business plan necessarily require ownership of user data? I agree that the success of the model does rely on user activity and time on the site. But does activity necessitate ownership?
In one way, it seems like the facebook business model is completely dependent on the difficulty of data portability. The more friends you have, the more pictures you’ve posted and time you’ve invested in facebook as your single contact point, the more difficult it is to start over somewhere else.
It’s an idea much more eloquently stated by Vince Lombardi: "The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender."
I Own The Profile Data, You Own The Link?
In his blog today, Chris Brogan sums up the confusion between who owns what as:
I’m not sure my take on this, but wanted to bring it to you for consideration. On one side, I want to be able to move my personal data from site to site, because if I spent the effort building it in there, I want to get it back out. On another side, is the friending process of Facebook THEIR data or is it mine? My friends, yes, but is the link and the semantic data built between us something that Facebook owns?
Is facebook the owner of the digital connection between otherwise disconnected profile nodes? Or are they simply giving temporary free storage to whatever you’d like, so long as your data stays in their building?
Facebook Can Take From Others But Not The Other Way Around
In one of his twitter posts today, Scoble mentions the fact that facebook lets users find friends by scraping gmail, hotmail, yahoo, and IM accounts. It’s okay for facebook to piggyback on other services, but when it comes to letting other services go into facebook to retrieve contacts, that’s a no-no.
An article in Wired entitled Should Web Giants Let Startups Use The Information They Have About You looked at the practice of scraping as it related to facebook, linkedIn and hotmail:
But recently, as the competition between social networks heats up, scraping has emerged as a high-stakes strategy. Microsoft announced a $240million investment in Facebook last fall, and within weeks, LinkedIn users found themselves suddenly unable to import their webmail contacts from Microsoft’s webmail services. Angus Logan, a Microsoft executive, says the restrictions are a matter of security and that the company is developing user-data APIs. "We do not advocate the practice of contacts scraping," he says, "as we believe it poses unnecessary risks to consumers, whether it be for nefarious practices like phishing scams or more straightforward social networking activities." But that philosophy is applied inconsistently. As of late November, Facebook members were still able to import their Microsoft webmail accounts through scraping.
Summing It Up
The explosion of articles on data portability has me all fired up and to be honest, I’m really excited. We’ve all been thinking about the difficulty of having truly portable data based on the current model. In that model:
- Redundancy is a necessity
- The cold start problem is always present
- Networks have more incentive to make it difficult to leave rather than give compelling reasons to stay
I truly believe that the current "your data stays here" model will not last. These are exciting times.
