DISQUS

There is room for an open source approach and a clsoed approach with Facebook and open APIs. E.g. Linux vs Microsoft products. Both can coe-exist and in fact complement each other. They are both stronger for their different approaches.

I would not like to see my personal details available to everyone whom I may have friended to do as they wish.

In the incident involving Robert Scoble, why does anyone think that scraping someone's date of birth is acceptable? This is commonly used for bank security!

Further, when you sign up to Facebook, you are forced to agree in their terms of service to supply your date of birth, so there is no choice that can be made not to have this information on Facebook.

A walled approach is exactly what I want, unless the user can decide exactly what information he/she wants to share with data scraping tools or anyone else.

With the number of users increasing, why would you not expect to find (over time) a tailing off in active users. Perhaps, there are more facebook users who have signed up because of friend pressure but aren't taking it very seriously at the moment or because they haven't got many friends yet.

This is probably bound to happen as the website popularity increases. Facebook pioneers are always likely to be the most active.