Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

Some interesting things are happening in Web2.0 land. There has been quite the dustup, started by Facebook kicking Richard Scoble off, because he’d violated the Facebook terms of service. As a result, Scoble joined the group dataportability.org, which I’ve been monitoring for a few months now. Why did Scoble get booted (he has since been reinstated)? Because of a script that scraped names and email addresses from Facebook, called Plaxo Pulse.

I think people are finally realizing that the current state of affairs - where we can pump data into Facebook and other social networks, but not get data out of them, is untenable. There’s a poll on mashable.com, where the sentiment is most certainly heavily in favor of Facebook opening up the social graph.

So after my brief lapse, I’m going back to my promise: no more social networks until the data flows both ways, and I can take my social graph with me.