Social media sluts of the world, unite!

Social media sluts of the world, unite!
by: Wayne MacPhail

Last week a lot of us online got to ponder the question: "Do you want to be a social media slut, or not?"

Last Monday morning the web was abuzz with the news that uber-blogger Robert Scoble had been kicked off of the social network site, facebook. Reason? He had run an early version of a script from a social media company called Plaxo. The script combed through personal information about Scoble's 5000 facebook friends and created a database of info they had shared. It even grabbed their email addresses, which facebook protects by rendering them as graphics on the facebook site. The Plaxo script used optical character recognition to decode them. But, that's not important. What is important is that this sort of "site scraping" violates the Terms of Service agreement (TOS) facebook has with its users. And, for that, Scoble's account was turned off.

Scoble argued that he was just testing the script and that he doesn't plan on using the data he harvested (this came after a hue and cry about his scraping). He also made it clear that he also wanted to "push facebook's buttons", which he did in spades.

Why the concern? There were two camps. One argued that Scoble was a limelight hog who should have known full-well that he was violating facebook's Terms of Service agreement and should have expected to be kicked off. And, that facebook was right to do it. And that he was a corporate spy.

Read the entire article here: http://rabble.ca/news_full_story.shtml?sh_itm=c82f73928ccef010366746b42468421a&rXn=1&