Paul Buchheit - Latest Comments in Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

cafeworldcheats — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 08:04:29 -0000

Gmail and Yahoo is the most used email. why block it?

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

Guest — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 13:06:48 -0000

I've been getting a growing number of Facebook invitations; one week it went up to four, and I consider it spam. The people who opened their contacts list to Facebook have exposed me to this. I think it was inconsiderate and irresponsible for their part. It's not different from sending e-mails to dozens of accounts, all of them openly visible to anyone getting that e-mail. The TOS try to avoid robots breaking into their databases - or being invited into them by ignorant, gullible or malicious users - to precisely avoid that unrequested attention. Faceboon and other similar social networks have become just plain invasive and obnoxious, and it's only going to get worse. Just because a bunch of people think it's cool, is no reason to subject the rest of us to it. I think it should be banned and blacklisted.

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

ijt — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 02:41:02 -0000

It hardly makes sense to close people's accounts for violating the terms of service this way since most likely it's not intentional. Maybe the terms of use should have an exception since it's not like this is being used for spam or other badness.

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

SeattleGuy — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 20:27:56 -0000

Yikes, what a concept. Lets allow everyone to block everyone else... But, doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose of Facebook, LinkedIN and all the rest.

It just sounds like Facebook is taking their ball and headin' home. Pantywaists!

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

Wesha — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:55:22 -0000

... and Google has no problems indexing Facebook pages.

Pot calling kettle black? :)))

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

James — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:33:22 -0000

Hell yes. Block them. Quite unacceptable for them to go around and say you can't do what we do.

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

Andrew — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 15:28:49 -0000

Yes they should. Facebook is teh evilz.

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

macbeach — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 14:36:13 -0000

I'm not sure Gmail should even be lumped together with Yahoo and Hotmail. Gmail makes it easy to export all of my data (I'm not sure this is true of Orkut), while Yahoo and Hotmail are what I consider "walled gardens". While I don't think hypocrisy is a cardinal sin, I think it is worthy of much community scorn when practiced by companies, particularly those as successful as these. If your service allows me to use its servers to log into or in any other way gather data from a competing service, then I think they should allow the same action to be performed by those services in the other direction.

Gmail and Google in general have a stated policy (by Schmidt at least) of not holding user data hostage. I know of no such statement from Yahoo or Microsoft, and both companies have a long history of "walled garden" behavior.

Facebook hypocritically claims that they are protecting their servers from harm by not allowing scraping. But if that were actually the case, they could allow a simple text export of my contact data for import into other services. Clearly their only concern is that they be allowed to capture data from other services and not be obligated to give it back.

Furthermore, and not nearly well enough articulated by the blogosphere (or whatever) is the fact that Facebook retains your data even if you cancel your account. I can't think of any other company that does this, and it strikes me as actionable, even though it is in their TOS. It's like the non-compete clause of an employment contract: Yeah, it's in there, and yeah, you signed it, but it is enforcable? Quite another matter.

Still, anyone granting Facebook access to a lot of personal information after reading (I know, they didn't) that TOS is nuts.

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

thomashan — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 11:53:04 -0000

Paul... hmmm that is interesting food for thought... I wonder how many sites would be shutdown if we follow *ALL* the TOS

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

MParekh — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 11:37:55 -0000

Yes,
everyone should be on a level playing field.
Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft et al should be applauded for allowing the contact exports despite their TOSes.

Facebook needs to learn to play fair on this front as well.

Especially since it's the right thing to do for the users.

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

ceonyc — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 09:33:49 -0000

You're right... they probably should.

The issue is that you can't police things use by use. I don't spam my contacts on LinkedIn or Facebook, so no one has ever asked me how I knew they were there. I could have just done a manual search by name... however, the general concept of spidering content without permission from non-public spaces is probably a bad thing. Drawing the line of abuse is tough, so they put a catch-all TOS in there, but technically, you're right...

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

Mark Evans — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 07:49:53 -0000

In theory, they should stop people from doing it. In practice, they probably have more to gain than lose, which is why no one has done any blocking...yet.

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

drBaher — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 05:08:36 -0000

What you raised is a perfectly legitimate question, based on what facebook has done to scoble (not that it's wrong), Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo are entitled to do the same.

Facebook better come up with acceptable means for people to take control of their data (not all of it).

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

mihaia — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 05:06:03 -0000

"How about a standard way to authorize a third party to get my address book?"
It already exists, it's called OAuth. If you would like it then support DataPortability.

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

ithinkihaveacat — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 04:09:41 -0000

There's some discussion about this in a recent Wired article, which also claims: "Microsoft announced a $240million investment in Facebook last fall, and within weeks, LinkedIn users found themselves suddenly unable to import their webmail contacts from Microsoft's webmail services."

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

Scobleizer — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 03:33:33 -0000

It's not. This is the real Robert Scoble and I don't agree with the original poster.

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

KesheR — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 03:26:28 -0000

NO.

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

Eric Blair — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 03:20:18 -0000

"My FB Contacts is a free and easy way to export and backup the contact details of your friends on Facebook. Once exported you can then import your contacts in to your Gmail, Hotmail or Outlook account."

http://myfbcontacts.blogspo...

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

asteele — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:36:29 -0000

NO. Definitely not.

Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail should take the high road, let Facebook continue to be a "dead end" until they realize that by opening up they could unlock far more value, by which time it will probably be too late for them.

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

obscurelyfamous — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:34:39 -0000

As far as I can tell, it isn't.

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

paulbuchheit — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 00:23:42 -0000

I doubt this is the real Robert Scoble. If it is, please verify your Disqus account, otherwise I'll delete the comment in a bit.

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

Dallas J Clark — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 23:32:38 -0000

haha this has gone crazy

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

Stanislav Shalunov — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 22:46:01 -0000

I used the Friend Finder on Facebook, too. Indeed, very helpful. I uploaded my address book, which I downloaded from Gmail and LinkedIn (merging the two), without giving these guys any passwords.

Facebook's refusal to let me download my address book from Facebook is my biggest gripe about their service. Plaxo was going to solve this problem, and anything Google and Yahoo can do to help Plaxo in this round should help them in the long term. Google in particular already has an export feature, so it comes with the best hand.

How about a standard way to authorize a third party to get my address book? This way, I could tell Gmail and LinkedIn and Facebook to allow Plaxo. This should come as an option -- one-time access or continued.

Google has a carrot here, too.

While I'm not prepared to let Facebook have my email password, I'd gladly let them have my email address book. Particularly, if they suggest new friends to me and *let me export it back*.

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

Robert Scoble — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 22:38:58 -0000

Facebook (or Facebook users who gave up their login credentials to Facebook) clearly violated those terms of use, so yes, by all means block them.

Gmail users in particular shouldn't complain, since Gmail offers a legitimate way for you to export most anything (e.g. Gmail contacts to .csv files).

Re: Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?

Greg G — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 22:27:44 -0000

Thats a pretty convincing argument, even more so than Scoble's original.