Life is grand

So apparently Plaxo flubbed it and Robert Scoble is a corporate spy. Never mind that those self-same commentators probably used the GMail contact importer feature of Facebook. Never mind that I can go into Facebook right now and hand-copy every one of my contact’s email addresses, birthdates, sexual orientation and favourite colour and type that into Plaxo.

When you agree to a friend request on a social networking site you are agreeing to share your information with that “friend”. Make sure it is a trusted friend or colleague, not just another tick in your march to having the biggest social network.

I am glad this has happened though. It highlights to a larger audience why oAuth is important and why typing your GMail login into Facebook is a bad thing. It also highlights that a bit more thought should be given to how people use social-network sites and more thought given to how social-network sites are constructed. Friend requests are not equal, we need finer grained data sharing systems.

Now if only everyone would take this as a good lesson rather than as a chance to bad mouth Scoble, Arrington, Plaxo, Facebook etc. We should advance from this, not regress to name-calling.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 12:29 pm and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.