Posted January 6th, 2008, in: Semantic Web| Technology| Videos| Web 2.0

Video of Robert Scoble talking about his recent scuffle with FaceBook over on the Sun BabelFish Blog.

Henry Story’s article is worth reading too. In case you missed it, Scoble was scraping his contacts out of FaceBook using a script from Plaxo… FB detected the bot activity and shut his profile down. Later a little diplomacy got his account freed up again…

There’s a lot of chatter about this going on which makes me feel good.

Maybe it will be this year, maybe in 5 or 10 years but eventually we will have distributed social networking owned by the people who are in it. I will own my data and you will own yours. Standards will make our data friendly.

From Henry Story (this is clutch!):

Really what you want is the following:

1. Selectivity in who gets what information about you:
   • Strangers should be able to see the minimum information I want to make public.
   • acquaintances should see more
   • family should see other information
   • … these policies should be flexible and determinable by the owner of the information, by the person making the speech act of affirming it.

   And even though I may be happy for a service provider to maintain this data, you may not even wish to allow them access to it. It should be possible to have this information on your server at home controlled only by you.

2. Link to friends wherever they are. After all if you have to go through one central aggregator of relationship information, then that aggregator will have a view of all the relationship information available, giving one actor complete and overwhelming advantage as opposed to everyone else. You need distributed data, also known as linked data or hyperdata.
3. An Open Data structure so as to allow ecosystems to grow and use that information. I want the tools on my computer to all be able to work with my social network information.
4. A way to determine trust