DISQUS

Couple of thoughts:

1) It's not like Facebook has suddenly changed the rules or some data policy. They've always been an information roach motel - this is nothing new. To now decide you don't like the TOS is fine but you can't slam the company because you no longer agree with their rules.

2) Yes Scoble's intended use was personal/not spammy but how is Facebook supposed to be able tell the difference??? At the end of the day Scoble tripped a system that was designed to PROTECT the user data from unwanted uses. If he'd scraped everything he could have easily posted "I just swiped all your data from Facebook & they did nothing"... and we'd all be off down a different privacy shit storm direction...

This is one of those cases where a company had a pretty clear TOS and they're well within their rights to invoke the "if you don't like it, leave" clause.

"I think it does, although like my friend Mark Evans I rarely use it. "

Yeah, there's certainly certain contexts where LInkedIn either makes loads of sense, or none at all.

On our end we use it all the time as we're a heavily partner centric business. If we need to get an in-road with a specific vendor the first place we go to is usually LinkedIn to see who we know at the company, or closely connected to it.

It's created a lot of conversations for us that would have otherwise taken months to get started.

"is what the heck is Facebook planning to do with that $400-million?"

Are you kicking in the extra $100M personally Matt? ;)

I'd love to give it a spin...

I'm most interested to use the features that let you quickly piece together conversations and extract attached files etc. I live & die by my inbox so this seems like a great tool to help me pull information from my email client a lot more efficiently.

I'd love to give it a spin...

Great post Jevon...

I liken Dragon's Den to going on a Blind Date. But on this date there are only two possible outcomes, you're going to end up married to her (and maybe some of her friends) or you're going to look like an idiot.

There's very few businesses that could benefit from the nature of the Dragon's investment/exposure. Ironically I think Jobloft.com was one of them as a few of the investors were in the right spaces for them but we all know where that ended up.

But as a non-retail oriented technology/software company... not a chance in hell.

Great post Jevon...

I liken Dragon's Den to going on a Blind Date. But on this date there are only two possible outcomes, you're going to end up married to her (and maybe some of her friends) or you're going to look like an idiot.

There's very few businesses that could benefit from the nature of the Dragon's investment/exposure. Ironically I think Jobloft.com was one of them as a few of the investors were in the right spaces for them but we all know where that ended up.

But as a non-retail oriented technology/software company... not a chance in hell.

I think Twitter has one key spot where it can survive Facebook shifting its weight into their space.

If Twitter could deliver something that would expand their existing functionality so that it could update MSN, Skype, Facebook etc. status messages as well then they'd actually have something useful on their hands.

I've been amazed at how much content they've got and how good (great?) it tends to be... great blog.

Funny how they winge and moan about all the money they're "losing" due to sites like YouTube then they turn around and spend millions upon millions to reinvent the wheel...

I've noticed the spammers and got a co-author invite over the weekend. Kudos to MBL the "community" was gone by the time I received the email and went to the site wondering WTF?

As for spammers - I've just X'ed them off the list anytime I notice them, a pain but I peek at the MBL ticker periodically so not a big amount of work to simply click an "X", ideally MBL will figure out a way to suspend accounts if they register and quickly gather a large number of X's.

Hey John,

I had this problem as well last year - a solution I found was recommending feedburner to people. Feedburner will automatically render your RSS feed in a browser friendly way if you don't use a newsreader to view it.

If 'they' haven't blocked it yet then people can go firectly to your feedburner link and see the stories there.

Rub it in why don't you :)

Nice job Scott (and team)...

The way I see it MyBlogLog is the ideal stats platform for integrating into their Flickr & Del.icio.us properties - especially Flickr. I find more and more that I want more detail from how my Flickr stuff is being viewed and it just isn't there. When you look at Flickr, most already have an account, those with accounts have pictures. With a common Yahoo! ID suddenly all the Flickr users could easily have MBL accounts and start to show up in the widget all over the web. I think it's a win-win acquisition for Yahoo! adds value to an existing property and potentially creates more value in the new property. (provided they bother to integrate them all :/)

Great link Mathew... so much for a productive morning. ;)

The "social momentum" has always been a concern for me with sites like Digg.

Earlier in the year I had a problem with my Gmail account and did a blog post about it - at first I thought it was a bug.

Of course the prospect of a Gmail bug got "Dugg" - 1 hour and 4,000 hits later (it hit the front page of digg in about 20 minutes) I realized what the issue was (It was not a bug but rather a - i think - stupid feature). By that time the damage was done though and there was no mechanism aside from my one vote to undig & bury the story to do anything about it. I edited the post to correct it and emailed digg admins but at that point all I could do was sit back and watch. It eventually got force buried by the admins but it's still on the site. Even after the post was corrected & numerous comments were made saying it was incorrect it still kept getting dugg at a furious pace (almost 900 total) - people just didn't seem to care or read it, they saw Gmail, Bug and Dugg it.

(Heck it got slashdotted two days later even though it had been corrected for over 48 hours - so clearly they don't even read the stories sometimes)

I don't know why they would have outright deleted the story though , doesn't make any sense... unless Sony's lawyers had a word about them. Those Diggs, even when buried still get found all the time (I still get 10-20 hits a week via that link)

"To Scoble, however (and to me as well), it seems more like helping"

I have to agree - I realized recently (belatedly) that I had, in a sense, become a "human aggregator" for several friends and colleagues. So rather than continually emailing people links and what not they all got one email the other day that basically said "Here's my shared items - anything interesting will be there"

I can see if someone was sharing every post from another person's blog that might be a bit much but the odd article here and there is well within the realm of "fair use" etc.

I can sort of understand the uneasy factor about this type of solution. I personally go back and forth. I guess, as long as it's tied to my PC only, and used to serve me ads that I'm more likely to be interested in I don't have an issue.

If, however, I search "Volvo" one week and then the next get piled with physical junk mail at home from Volvo because Google has tied my PC w/my Google account (which has my address through my AdSense profile) Then yeah - over the line.

I don't really get his point - these credibility of these camps etc. are entirely founded on relevance. If Tim O'Reilly wants to have a closed conference that's his choice. The risk he runs if they're only getting people who share their views is potential death by echo chamber.

This is why events like BarCamp (and the various *Camp offspring) came about. I don't see the risk for Web 2.0 because last I checked the community was alive, talking and interacting quite actively (Look at BarCampEarth last weekend - 10+ cities having simulatneous camps). I'm sure Dave would be more then welcome to come to his local Camp and do a session on "Why O'Reilly is doomed to Fail" or whatever else he is concerned about at the time.

Sounds more like a case of someone's invite getting "lost" in the mail.

I think the biggest misconception about privacy online is the mistaken assumption by many people that anyone actually cares about what they've been searching - except maybe marketers. And what are marketers trying to do? Understand what your likes/dislikes and concerns are to present you with products and services that may be more interesting to you rather then blindly pumping shotgun style advertising at everyone. And even then - this isn't some new online "thing" - I'll guarantee you a store like WalMart could tell you everything I've ever bought from their bricks & mortar store. I remember a couple years back a few stories too about Best Buy weeding out unwanted customers from their mailing lists based on credit cards and purchase histories too.

It will be interesting over time to see how this plays out.

On one hand it could encourage people to post/submit more to sites like Digg in the faint hope of catching the eye of Netscape to get a gig.

The real "publicity stunt" vs. "genuine concern" will show when Netscape starts getting it's own top submitters. Will Jason pay them too? And at then what's the threshold for who gets paid? Top 10? Top 20... how's 21 going to feel?

I think the mistake Jason makes in his whole rant is the assumption that these users want to be paid or expected to be paid. Sure some of them will take the money (an extra $1K for doing what you're already doing? sure!). I think the web has gotten so vast that in many cases just seeing your story, with your name as the submitter is enough for many people. Heck look at how everyone stumbles all over themselves trying to get their first "greenlight" at Fark...