
It’s too late for Dave Winer and John Battelle to save the common web - minecraftman
http://scobleizer.com/2012/02/04/its-too-late-for-dave-winer-and-john-battelle-to-save-the-common-web/
======
trotsky
I'm quite torn: I simply can't decide what portion of this post I'm most
captivated by. Is it the fact that John knows the exact date from over four
years ago that he was booted from facebook? Maybe it's the feat of name
dropping a whopping nine different people (I think.. I got dizzy counting)
while more or less telling a story about saving a flat file with commas in it.
It could be the fact that I just found out that Scoble was a pioneer in the
fight for the open web while almost every time I've crossed paths with him in
the last several years he's been dry humping a brand new buzzworthy social
media platform to death. In the end, though, I'm pretty sure I've settled on
the idea that yesterday on what I assume is a professional style radiopodcast
thing a number of grown men spent a measurable amount of time arguing about
how potentially fair or totally unfair it was that one of them got banned by
facebook and also whether heather in 7th period likes one of them.

The only downside of the whole thing is the part where he goes on a broken
spirited nihilistic rant about how hopeless everything is while suggesting I
may be a social pariah for not having a facebook account.

He and I clearly have a somewhat different perspective on the world, but I am
sympathetic to several of the issues he raises. It seems most of his despair
revolves around the sense of having "lost" and being overtaken by events. He
responds by saying screw it I just don't give a shit about my principles
because they aren't working out for me. But the world ebs and flows, and more
importantly it needs some people to take a few principled stands about what
they believe in and remind people about issues even when not personally
advantageous.

Consider what became of the 90's cypherpunk visions as they were soundly
crushed by a new millennium bent on ubiquitous private tracking, massive
government wiretaps and swiss cheese security. Who would have guessed such an
ice age of uncoolness would thaw out in a world where wikileaks was the story
of the year, people split dinner with me using money a russian teenager
created using a cluster of high performance crypto gear and people organized
revolutions online.

Giving up is boring.

~~~
dasil003
There's certainly an irony to the idea that such inexorable privatization of
"the web" has occurred within the last 4 years that there's no point in even
trying to effect any future change in a positive direction. My only real take
away from this article is that if you are a Scoble-magnitude tech pundit then
you are pretty much forced to use proprietary tools to maximize your audience.
It's a bit like reality TV stars who have to join a trashy television program
to get the attention they crave—it's a shortcut to a certain end, but it's not
the way work that matters is done.

------
Isofarro
IIRC, Scoble was cajoled by Plaxo to run this script against his account under
the premise that he could then import all that data into Plaxo. Scoble got
caught running this automated script, a violation of the terms and service
that he'd previously agreed to. This became a PR issue - I guess this is what
Plaxo was hoping for, except Facebook merely reinstated Scoble's account on
condition he didn't run that script again (couched in terms of not breaching
the T&C again).

Plaxo is nowhere to be seen these days, so I guess the PR backlash against
Facebook didn't give Plaxo the boost they needed.

Later on in the Gilmor Gang Scoble defended his actions by suggesting Facebook
was just a Rolodex of contacts, and thus he has the right to export all the
data of his contacts for his own purposes; pointing out that how is a crawler
bot different from him copying over his 5000 contacts into Outlook one at a
time (IIRC, Facebook displayed email address as an image on profile pages, so
there'd be no paste).

Only today the story has changed that this was really Scoble fighting for the
survival of the common web. That's an interesting position to take 4 years
later. I don't recall him bringing this justification up before. Perhaps he
has in closed networks like Facebook.

If that indeed was the true reason Scoble ran a scraper script against
Facebook, then I'm surprised he went through so much trouble to get his
Facebook account re-enabled, and then do nothing to safeguard his data against
other Facebook reactions to future violations.

Now he's on Google+, and yet this Facebook data still isn't exportable, and
I've not seen any complaint from Scoble about not being able to move all his
contacts data from Facebook to Google+. I don't recall Scoble using "the
common Web" as justification for uprooting from Facebook to Google+, or from
moving away from his blog to Google+.

Not sure I approve of this revisionism. If an common Web is important, surely
not being dependent on a closed platform is an obvious strategy?

~~~
greyman
>> Now he's on Google+, and yet this Facebook data still isn't exportable, and
I've not seen any complaint from Scoble about not being able to move all his
contacts data from Facebook to Google+.

Yes, but Scoble explains why he doesn't complain anymore - because the time
when it was worth complaining is over, and other tech influencers at that time
didn't join Scoble in his fight. Now, I agree with Scoble, that it is just too
late - Facebook will simply not allow you to export your social graph, and
that's it. You can just waste your time complaining, or delete your account,
but that's all you can do.

~~~
18pfsmt
> _\- Facebook will simply not allow you to export your social graph, and
> that's it. You can just waste your time complaining, or delete your account,
> but that's all you can do._

I'm not sure that's completely true. One could write a browser extension that
extracted the data slowly over time and / or use a caching proxy in order to
the same thing. I've been digging in to Squid to see how this might be done,
but I've just started. Also, for those with smartphones, it seems like the way
mobile FB apps integrate with address books might provide another way to
backup one's contacts.

~~~
bosse
Yeah, _you_ can probably do it, but providing a public tool for scraping
Facebook (or digging through caches) might be against the terms and
conditions, and would probably get the hammer from Facebook counsel.

------
fjarlq
_Deleting your [Facebook] account just makes you look like a weirdo in today’s
world._

I disagree. It's really not a big deal to be without a Facebook account.

~~~
k-mcgrady
You're both wrong :) It depends on your age, where you live, and your social
circle. For a lot of people, myself included, deleting your Facebook account
would be ridiculous to even consider. For example, myself and several of my
friends are spending time working and studying abroad. Facebook is the best
way to keep in touch.

~~~
shioyama
I've been living across an ocean from my family for over 10 years, deactivated
my FB account 2 years ago and never turned back. So I really don't understand
your "ridiculous to even consider" -- there are many other ways to keep in
touch, and doing without the firehose of low-quality information (wall posts,
movie recommendations, etc.) pouring through FB gives you more time to focus
on the high-quality information that can be better communicated through other
media (phone, email, etc.)

I understand that leaving FB (or never using it) is not for everybody, but
"ridiculous to even consider" goes way too far. I think actually it would be
great for a lot more people to consider it, even if they end up deciding not
to actually do it.

~~~
DeusExMachina
It's not my case, but I've heard from some people that they got on Facebook
because friends where organizing events there and not having an account meant
not being included in these events. This might be a case where it's
"ridiculous to even consider".

In the end it depends on the ways people use it. If it's the only channel for
communication, then you have to be in it.

~~~
Tichy
You just have to be cool enough so that people start thinking "how can we
organize the event so that X will also show up". Problem solved :-)

Another question: do you really want to meet people who would exclude you from
an event just because you don't have a Facebook account? Friends don't exclude
friends...

~~~
icebraining
You seem to assume it's on purpose. When almost everyone in your circle has a
Facebook account, it's easy to forget that person X or Y doesn't (usually
depending on how close a friend they are with them).

Personally, I don't miss my account, but I can understand why others can.

------
Xuzz
I would actually agree that his Facebook scraping should get him kicked off,
but not due to some terms of service crap. But think about it. Whose data was
he scraping? Maybe Facebook's, maybe the user who entered it should own it.
But I don't think it's fair for anyone else to grab all that data and use it
for other purposes.

I'm _glad_ that Facebook protects me from someone trying to do that with the
data I give them.

~~~
raganwald
If you’re on FB and you friend me and you allow me to see your name and phone
number, I can copy and paste it manually. What exactly are FB protecting you
from? The people you’ve already trusted with your name and phone number?

FB are protecting you from your friends migrating away from FB. Right now that
phone book and those pictures and those birthdays all act as a barrier to
leaving FB. If it was easy for someone—who you have already trusted,
remember—to download your name and phone number and birthday, they might leave
and just call you on your birthday. Or send you an email.

FB has protected themselves. Which is their right, but given that the people
you’ve trusted with your phone number can already copy and paste it, FB’s road
blocks aren’t about your privacy, they’re about creating friction.

~~~
Isofarro
"If you’re on FB and you friend me and you allow me to see your name and phone
number, I can copy and paste it manually."

At the time of the Scoble/Plaxo scraping thing, you couldn't copy and paste
the phone number. IIRC, it was an image of text, to prevent it from being
copied. It could only be transcribed at that time.

------
ck2
As someone who has never joined Facebook and is not even tempted, I have to
wonder - I mean the web is not like a TV set with just channels 2-13, or even
channels 2-100

The web has hundreds of thousands channels. Facebook doesn't own them any more
than Google owns search - they are just better at it for now so more people
tune in - build an alternative and they will come - slowly at first, but they
will come.

~~~
da02
Especially when you consider how Google+ got millions of users quickly and how
Formspring.me was once described as "addictive". The only thing left is figure
out how to be more entertaining than the competition and not get boring.
Formspring.me loses its novelty value after a while.

Steve Case used to tell AOL employees, "What can you do for AOL that will get
people to ignore Seinfeld after dinner and head straight for AOL?"
[https://www.google.com/search?q=steve+case+%22would+always+s...](https://www.google.com/search?q=steve+case+%22would+always+say+that+Seinfeld+is+the+competition.%22)

However, I believe you are a minority. Few people think about creating
something popular with the mass market. Most seem to want to build a "niche"
product so they can buy their McMansion in the suburbs. Most people want to be
engineers or entertainers, but not both.

------
sounds
Specifically, to save the URL as the least common denominator of the web.

See <http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html>

------
snowwrestler
What about Facebook is not open? Facebook.com can be reached from any computer
with an Internet connection. The content is standards-compliant HTML, CSS, and
Javascript, delivered via standards-compliant TCP/IP. Anyone can create an
account. Anyone can interact with anyone else, provided they mutually agree to
do so.

The content is not indexable by search engines--true. But, while that is
obviously a problem for search engine companies, that doesn't mean it's not
"open."

In terms of getting data out, I had every piece of data I entered into
Facebook before I entered it. I have my personal info. My photos and videos
were on my cameras, phones, or computers before I uploaded them. The links I
posted were in my browser history first. My comments were in my head before I
typed them out.

Sure I don't have an easy way to export my friends' data, but that is not my
data--it's theirs. Anyway if they are really my friends I can just ask them
for their email address or phone number or whatever.

What am I missing? Facebook is a website that requires authentication to use
certain features. So is scobleizer.com.

~~~
mindcrime
One problem is that, yes, _"Anyone can interact with anyone else, provided
they mutually agree to do so,"_ but they can only interact in the ways that
Facebook defines and allows. You can't, for example, easily write your own app
to run on whatever platform you happen to use (hell, maybe you want a "green
screen" AS/400 app, who knows?) that lets you post to your friends' wall, or
read their posts. And you can't easily load the data about your friends into a
database that lets you query it... I mean, quick, how do you find "all my
friends with birthdays in March" on Facebook? OK, that was a contrived, off-
the-cuff example, but it gets to the point of the thing.

 _Sure I don't have an easy way to export my friends' data, but that is not my
data--it's theirs._

That's arguable, IMO. If I have a list of my friends phone numbers and
birthdays in a pen and paper address book, would you argue that I don't have
the right to copy that book, or remix / reorganize / reuse the data in it, as
I want (so long as I'm not violating my friends' rights somehow in the
process, like spamming them)?

What we need is for Facebook / G+ etc. to adopt the work being done by the
Semantic Web community and the Federated Social Web XG and open the "walled
gardens." OR we need new platform(s) to emerge that do so, and for those
platforms to supplant Facebook and the other centralized, dictatorial
platforms.

~~~
mgkimsal
twitter/goog/facebook will, at some point, create a social CRM, or general PRM
(personal relationship manager) with real, actionable, detailed functionality,
but it will be enterprisey at a cost level, at least at first. Yes, total
guess here on my part but...

When you've got detailed stats on hundreds of millions of users, and how they
relate, yes, making money from ads is one revenue stream. The next will be
selling that data back to us via nice database interfaces.

select * from followers_of_my_followers where birthday=today and interested in
('fashion','shoes','puppies'); followers.each { follower.message("Happy
Birthday from frobozzco! click here for 20% off our new hushpuppies in neon
green!"); }

We could pretty easily do that sort of stuff today if there was more of an
opportunity for extraction/scraping/mining, but that's generally discouraged
by the big players, because, I think, they're going to sell it back to us on a
per-use or monthly fee.

------
Karunamon
You were not kicked off of Facebook because of "running a script to try to
save the common web".

They kicked you off for running a data scraper in violation of the terms of
service you agreed to when signing up an account.

------
voidfiles
I actually wrote about this a couple of days ago. Winer even responded to me
on twitter. I think we need to change the premise of the conversation. That
might help inspire a new generation of young startups.

[http://www.rumproarious.com/2012/01/31/rss-needs-a-new-pr-
te...](http://www.rumproarious.com/2012/01/31/rss-needs-a-new-pr-team/)

~~~
damptrousers
Hey responded because you insulted him. Of course, you were right. Enough
people hate dave winer that RSS does need a new face, but you, like a lot of
writers, backed down when confronted with him. You should have stuck to your
guns, because you were right.

------
mark_l_watson
Well, I am for an open web, especially in the linked data/semantic web sense.
That said, Facebook, Google, and Twitter make it really easy to export your
data. Just to be sure about Facebook, I just went to my account settings and
requested a data dump, which is happening right now. Similarly, I like to
periodically dump my GMail, Google documents, and Blogger blog posts. It seems
stupid not backing up your own data. I don't back up G+ data but I use G+
mostly just to link to my long Blogger blog posts. For a public presence,
people should really own their own domains. Blogger makes it really easy to
assign your blog to a subdomain that you own.

I take a few steps to maintain a modicum of privacy: I log off Facebook after
looking at family and friend's posts, and I often run Chrome in Incognito mode
because I think that it makes general web browsing a little safer.

~~~
18pfsmt
Whatever this data dump from FB consists of, is it in some usable form? My
understanding is that it's a pdf without any ability to import it into any
other software. For example, can you import birthdays directly into iCal (or
w/e) or import email/ phone #s into your desktop or mobile addressbook?

~~~
mark_l_watson
I just downloaded the dump. It is HTML and JPEG images. So, you are correct:
you would need to write a script to extract what you want.

------
lhnz
This is a very boring techpolitics piece but it does give one interesting
thought:

In a search for privacy we are locking ourselves in other's walled gardens.

------
wccrawford
I think a lot of the problem is that there's no easy, good set of protocols
for social networking.

Want to plan a party? There's no protocol for that. We have email and
calendars, but we don't have party planning. You can't fire up your calendar
client and organize a party with. The best you can do is set a reminder for
yourself and then invite others to share that reminder. No comments, RSVPs,
etc etc.

Want to share a link with people and have moderateable comments? There's no
protocol. Plenty of sites will do it, but none are interoperable.

You can lament the loss of the open web all you want, but if you aren't
helping make these protocols a reality, you aren't part of the solution.

------
siasia
I don't get it. Couldn't this scraping be easily done with own Facebook API?
Why should you run a scraper to find out all your friends?

~~~
jfarmer
Phone numbers aren't exposed via the Facebook API under any circumstance. For
a long time it was the same with emails, including when Scoble wrote that
script, but now you can get a user's email by specifically asking for that
information via the permissions API.

~~~
martey
This is not entirely true. A Facebook application can get an email address of
an authorized user by requesting it [1] (in the authorization dialog, the user
can choose to send the application either the email address they signed up
with Facebook for, or a proxied Facebook email address). There is currently no
way to use the Graph API to retrieve your friends' email addresses.

[1] To do this, your application has to request the _email_ permission. There
is no equivalent _friends_email_ permission. See
[http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/permission...](http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/permissions/#user_friends_perms)

~~~
jfarmer
Ah, true, yes, if I authenticate a Facebook application against my account I
can't give it access to my friends' emails, which was the core functionality
of Scoble's script.

------
albertzeyer
Or you could get your Facebook data via this way: [http://www.europe-v-
facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_...](http://www.europe-v-
facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_data_.html)

~~~
sirclueless
That won't work. They certainly don't include friends' contact info when you
request data that way.

------
jroseattle
So, exportable contacts = the common web? Please, Scoble, just stop it
already.

With these posts, Scoble simply reinforces my personal impression of him as
the Court Jester of the Internet.

------
joering1
if it really become a problem I dont think Fb/Zuck can stop
hackers/programmers from building tools to export user profile, all photos,
data, etc.

its quite simple VB stand-alone (so they dont block one IP) application with
IE window in it. you log in, and VB is scrapping all the data creating excel
file with contacts, saving images organized in folders for other web import,
etc). not that big of a deal, right?

------
Raphael
Scoble is lazy. If you really care about a contact, you will copy the
information even if it requires typing each individual character.

------
shareme
its the gopher argument..

Some of yo may remember an alternative to web called gopher..

It eventually died due to web being free and it not being free.

The form that is more'free'than fb as far as barriers, etc will out-compete
fb.. DW, etc have very little to worry about as this changes rapidly and does
not stay the same.

~~~
mcantelon
Gopher was open:

<http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1436>

It just sucked compared to HTTP.

~~~
pauljburke
I remember being shown mosaic on the day it went into limited academic beta
and (after half an hour or so) saying "It's pretty and all but I can't see how
it's ever going to replace gopher"... the person I said it to _still_ won't
let me forget that. However, at the time, I had a point. Not always easy to
see that with perfect hindsight.

~~~
sireat
I was the same way when I was shown Mosaic, neat, but what is the point of it?
At the time I was perfectly happy with the following text based applications:
email,newsgroups,MUDs,ftp.

------
guest
SURRENDER NERDS. WE HAS YOUR INTERNET.

