Thoughts on Scoblegate

The big blog news of the past 24 hours seems to be Robert Scoble getting blocked from Facebook for running a Plaxo scraper over his 5,000 contacts. I'm largely with Jeff and Mathew on this one, who both point out that the last thing they want to happen to their data (and I'm as puzzled as Jeff as to how Jeff's email address belongs to Robert Scoble any more than it does to Facebook) is for it to get into the hands of Plaxo.

The interesting thing here for me is that this is yet another example of a lot of fuss being made merely because something that it would be perfectly simple, if a little laborious, to do manually is being done efficiently and automatically. I can "export" my address book, contact details, friends' email addresses etc from anywhere to anywhere else by writing them out again. (Indeed, in the early days of mobile phones this is exactly how I had to transfer my address book whenever I bought a new phone.) Nothing Facebook or anyone can do about it. Blocking scraping tools isn't, therefore, the last word in corralling user data - it's just a nuisance cost imposed on customers, and another reason to desert Mark Z's evil empire.

Much the same attitude crops up time and again as people find effortless technical solutions for tasks they used to carry out manually. Now everyone skips ads using TiVo and BitTorrent the TV industry is apparently doomed, even though before TiVo we used to channel-surf over to MTV in the breaks or leave the room for a cup of tea. Kazaa and Napster were apparently the death of the music industry because they let kids share tunes for free, even though my adolescent, pre-web music collection was composed mainly of mix tapes from friends, stuff recorded off the radio and concert bootlegs. Plus ca change. 

It seems fatuous to get into a debate about the precise way in which Scoblegate isn't really news, but still...so Facebook is blocking scraping. Big deal. If I need to get the contact details for my friends out of there that badly I've got a biro, I've got the back of an envelope, I've got a spare hour this evening. That'll do the job just fine.

Update: seems Facebook has let Robert back in, on condition that he doesn't run the script again. Facebook really hasn't thought this one through. The message is that we can get away with scraping the site to get our contacts out once and only once - so if we're planning to leave it had better be for keeps.