The social networking site Facebook has a feature that permits its members to pull in contact information from web-based email systems at Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Hotmail. The feature helps people discover if those contacts already have a profile on Facebook.

Paul Buchheit wondered on his blog if the useful "Friend Finder" feature should be finding complaints from those email providers instead:

However, Gmail’s Terms of Use seems to prohibit this:
You also agree that you will not use any robot, spider, other automated device, or manual process to monitor or copy any content from the Service.

Facebook can also import contacts from Yahoo and Hotmail. Yahoo TOS says:
You agree not to access the Service by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Yahoo! for use in accessing the Service.

And Hotmail TOS says:
In using the service, you may not:
…
Use any automated process or service to access and/or use the service (such as a BOT, a spider, periodic caching of information stored by Microsoft, or "meta-searching")

All three services should be banning Facebook’s scripts, judging by those terms of service. Scoble’s actions, through the use of an alpha version of a new Plaxo Pulse feature, did what Facebook does routinely.

Microsoft may not be inclined to block the Facebook bots from Hotmail, due to the existing business relationship between the two companies. Google and Yahoo may not be interested in fighting Facebook on this at the moment, but that could change faster than you can say "Robert Scoble."

Facebook sent him an email that accused him of running an automated script which is in violation of Facebook’s terms of use.

Robert was indeed running an automated script as he explains in a post today, testing an as yet unreleased feature of Plaxo Pulse that scrapes Facebook pages for content like email addresses.

Blogosphere opinion about this issue seems more or less evenly divided if linked discussions shown on Techeme are any indicator, on support for Robert or support for Facebook’s action.

Either way, it throws a bright spotlight on data portability and who owns your data on a social network.

Shel and I talked about this as part of a discussion in today’s episode #307 of the FIR podcast.

What’s prompted this post is an interesting angle to the story by Michael Arrington writing in TechCrunch:

[…] [Plaxo] developed optical character recognition software to recognize email addresses and add them to the export.

Facebook doesn’t like this, of course. But it isn’t Plaxo that’s paying the price. It’s the journalists and bloggers who’ve been testing out the service.

[…] Plaxo was certainly aware of the risk. In an email from the company asking me to try the service last week, they said “We don’t know whether Facebook will try to shut us down (despite their increasing verbal support for the concepts of open-ness), so we want to let a few key folks have access to the functionality before we make it available to everyone.”

Yeah, they guessed right. Plaxo started running automated scripts against Facebook without any warning or discussion with them beforehand, in violation of their terms of service and, I’ll add, common sense. Of course users were shut down. Facebook must regulate this kind of behavior, without it the service would crumble.

So let me get this right.

Not only do you appear to have some journalists and bloggers using a social network in a way that’s in clear violation of the terms of use, using a tool produced by a company who thinks Facebook could take some disruptive action as a result, but also those same journalists and bloggers would have done this with some broad awareness that they might be violating terms of use.

They did read those terms of use, right?

It seems to me that the relevant part that addresses this is in the paragraph headed ‘Proprietary Rights in Site Content; Limited License’:

[…] Except for your own User Content, you may not upload or republish Site Content on any Internet, Intranet or Extranet site or incorporate the information in any other database or compilation, and any other use of the Site Content is strictly prohibited. Such license is subject to these Terms of Use and does not include use of any data mining, robots or similar data gathering or extraction methods. Any use of the Site or the Site Content other than as specifically authorized herein, without the prior written permission of Company, is strictly prohibited and will terminate the license granted herein.

So tell me – what envelope is being pushed here? Investigating new ways of connecting the dots, or getting to the limits of common sense?

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What does it collect?

Names and email address and birthday.

Why those? Because it’s trying to connect Facebook names with names in its database.

For instance, it learned that of the 5,000 people in my Facebook account about 1,800 were already on Plaxo.

It did NOT look at anything else. Just this stuff, no social graph data. No personal information.

Why do this?

I wanted to get all my contacts into my Microsoft Outlook address book and hook them up with the Plaxo system, which 1,800 of my friends are already on.

It’s ironic that you can import your Gmail address book into Facebook but you can’t export back out.

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