Dave Weighs in on Scoble/Facebook
January 3rd, 2008 by EyeOnWinerDave managed to contradict himself in his own post. He’s really making things easy for us here in 2008.
Sure, some of the data may “belong” to his friends, like their birthday and mail address. Technically of course the data doesn’t belong to anyone, it’s data about them, and many organizations have this data.
Dave’s argument, then, is that the data doesn’t belong to anybody, so it must be Scoble’s to take?
What about the contract Scoble agreed to when he signed up for his account? We know that Dave doesn’t care about EULAs, but maybe he should.
January 3rd, 2008 at 6:34 pm
This reminds me of my experience with one of Dave’s other “products”:
http://share.opml.org
The only way to get OPML out of the site was to scrape the HTML off one of the pages and convert the links to OPML. You could “share” your OPML but never get it back (in OPML). “One-way” version of sharing. Donate is more accurate:
http://donate.opml.org
The “product” did not catch on… people didn’t see the benefit.
People scrape HTML pages when they must (and when they have the skills to do so).
Services hate automated retrieval for several reasons:
1.) they can kill performance by over taxing servers. 2.) they often get a lot of data and allow the data to be re-purposed.
Google effectively caches all the web pages it can read and re-purposes the data to be an authoritative index. But the potential for “privacy” infringement is always mentioned as a justification for not allowing automated scraping. And justifiably so.