Ugh, I had promised not to read TechMeme anymore, and I’ve actually kept to my promise since then… until today. And as soon as I finish this post, I’m back on the wagon, but for now, it’s useful to point to the ongoing Scoble debacle for context and for backstory.
In a nutshell, Robert Scoble has friends on Facebook. These friends all have contact information and for whatever reason, he wants to dump that data into Outlook, his address book of choice. The problem is that Facebook makes it nearly impossible to do this in an automated fashion because, as a technical barrier, email addresses are provided as opaque images, not as easily-parseable text. So Scoble worked with the heretofore “trustworthy” Plaxo crew (way to blow it guys! Joseph, how could you?!) to write a scraper that would OCR the email addresses out of the images and dump them into his address book. Well, this got him banned from the service.
The controversy seems to over whether Scoble had the right to extract his friends’ email addresses from Facebook. Compounding the matter is the fact that these email addresses were not ones that Robert had contributed himself to Facebook, but that his contacts had provided. Allen Stern summed up the issue pretty well: My Social Network Data Is Not Yours To Steal or Borrow
. And as Dare pointed out, Scoble was wrong, Facebook was right.
Okay, that’s all well and fine.
You’ll note that this is the same fundamental design flaw of FOAF, the RDF format for storing contact information that preceded the purposely distinct microformats XFN and hcard:
The bigger issue impeding Plaxo’s public support of FOAF (and presumably the main issue that similar services are also mulling) is privacy: FOAF files make all information public and accessible by all, including the contents of the user’s address book (via foaf:knows).
Now, the concern today and the concern back in 2004 was the exposure of identifiers (email addresses) that can also be used to contact someone! By conflating contact information with unique identifiers, service providers got themselves in the untenable situation of not being able to share the list of identifiers externally or publicly without also revealing a mechanism that could be easily abused or spammed.
I won’t go into the benefits of using email for identifiers, because they do exist, but I do want to put forth a proposal that’s both long time in coming and long overdue, and frankly Kevin Marks and Scott Kveton have said it just as well as I could: URLs are people too. Kevin writes:
The underlying thing that is wrong with an email address is that its affordance is backwards — it enables people who have it to send things to you, but there’s no reliable way to know that a message is from you. Conversely, URLs have the opposite default affordance — people can go look at them and see what you have said about yourself, and computers can go and visit them and discover other ways to interact with what you have published, or ask you permission for more.
This is clearly the design advantage of OpenID. And it’s also clearly the direction that we need to go in for developing out distributed social networking applications. It’s also why OAuth is important to the mix, so that when you arrive at a public URL identifier-slash-OpenID, you can ask for access to certain things (like sending the person a message), and the owner of that identifier can decide whether to grant you that privilege or not. It no longer matters if the Scobles of the world leak my URL-based identifiers: they’re useless without the specific permissions that I grant on a per instance basis.
As well, I can give services permission to share the URL-based identifiers of my friends (on a per-instance basis) without the threat of betraying their confidence since their public URLs don’t reveal their sensitive contact information (unless they choose to publish it themselves or provide access to it). This allows me the dual benefit of being able to show up at any random web service and find my friends while not sharing information they haven’t given me permission to pass on to untrusted third parties.
So screen scrape factoryjoe.com all you want. I even have a starter hcard waiting for you, with all the contact information I care to publicly expose. Anything more than that? Well, you’re going to have to ask more politely to get it. You’ve got my URL, now, tell me, what else do you really need?
Factory Joe 