Facebook removed one of its users for trying to export his Facebook friends list to his other networking site. Facebook users shot back on hearing this news. Who the heck is Facebook to kick me out of the site? After all, its content like mine and millions of others that make up the 'Facebook' what it is today. Without users' content, its a piece of s**t. Atleast, this is how many Facebook users reacted on hearing the news.
What was the crime by the Facebook user, Scoble who got kicked out? Scoble tried to retrieve his friends list in Facebook for use in his other networking sites. Was it a crime in first place? YES. Atleast, as per the terms and conditions of Facebook usage. Hmm... i thought, it was ME, who added that contact to my friends list. And, now Facebook doesn't allow me to take it wherever i like to? Sounds unfair? Alright. Let's hear the Facebook's story. You own YOUR profile contents only. But, not others'. The contact details of your friends are certainly not yours and you don't have the right to distribute, as its deemed risky/whatever by Facebook.
As a fact, Facebook allows you to import contacts from your email address books such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL into Facebook and eventually, send a friend request or invite those email IDs. If Facebook doesn't mind scrape your email address book, what is wrong in someone else retrieving contacts from Facebook? Just like email address book maintains contacts, Facebook does the same. On the contrary, Facebook's only formidable competitor OpenSocial encourages users to share content/contacts across OpenSocial sites.
Unlike the past closed content model, where the contents were generated by sites and users were just consumers(Yahoo, MSN, Rediff), now is the generation of pro-sumer model, where user generates AND consumes content. Slowly but steadily, the user generated content is becoming the lifeline of successful sites. Facebook is the living proof of the model. LinkedIn, MySpace, Orkut are further proof of the power of user generated content. With OpenSocial encouraging users to share details across OpenSocial sites, how long it might take for Facebook to revert its decision?
The article that prompted me to write this post is here
No comments:
Post a Comment