Damien Mulley

Update: And if done in the EU we’d ave you mate.

Update again:Jeremiah is now allowing people to direct questions to Plaxo via his blog. Well done to him. Let’s see how they react to probing questions

Update: Jeremiah basically gave Plaxo a free pulpit where they tried to justify their actions using a smokescreen about a “Data Trust”. Total and utter bollox. Looks like they are going to roll this out and are unrepentent.

We’re going to have a conversation with Facebook (that is starting now) and will roll this feature out.

There’s a minor, gnat on a rhino’s arse issue going on around the tech blogger and twitter communities at the moment about data and Facebook. It will not change the world or unsteady it. If you are bored by this (and you should be) I’d suggest you skip this post. If you’re hardcore tech gossip nerd, then read on.

I really do like Robert Scoble and I don’t think he is malicious or someone with criminal intent. Saying that, I do think what he did today is very wrong.

So to begin: A while back Robert Scoble friended anyone on Facebook that wanted to be his friend, like he still does on Twitter. It was the in-thing that all the coolnerd kids did for a while – Friend the Scobleizer. Grand I suppose. Trouble is that the Facebook API allows any application to access the data of people I’m connected to. It can suck down their name, date of birth and other bits and pieces but NOT email address.

But then Robert decided he’d use a new unreleased tool from Plaxo to get the data on all 5000 people connected to him AND their email addresses too. Name, location, date of birth, full contact details. Alarm bells yet? Facebook’s security through obscurity meant I had limited protection if data identity thieves wanted to get my details. But now Robert has an automated tool that took disparate information and combined them. While many are happy for their data to be scattered about the place, it is through technnology and aggregation that all these pieces which were once scattered or loose are now firmly joined. This issue is about how weak identity it, but it is also about the fact that this is simply data theft in my view and Robert Scoble, a guy I have a lot of respect for is the one with the crowbar coming into my world taking things I stored on Facebook without permission. Robert broke into Facebook to get information he was not allowed.

I gave Facebook permission to store my data, I give it to Google. They give me some lightweight guarantees that they’ll be careful with it. Plaxo and I are not friends and they have not asked to hold or transport or fondle my data. Robert gets rewarded in ways with our friendship by being able to access data but this doesn’t mean I wanted him to harvest it. I’m ok with some of this information being exported but en masse? People are talking about this being a gambit for Data Portability. That’s utter bollox. That’s a smokescreen. You can campaign for data portability without stealing. You can tell me my identity is not secure without accessing my bank account. This is not some proof of concept on how insecure Facebook is either. This was a commercial move by Plaxo. If Google did this or Microsoft they’re be war.

I’d like to know what Robert is doing with my contact data and what Plaxo is also doing it it and what they are doing with the other 4,999 names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth and email addresses. I really hope they destroyed it right away. I’d also like to know whether Facebook will notify authorities about my data being stolen from them and see are there better ways to protect the data I invested in them?

I agree 100% at what Nick Carr said today too. Dare to a degree too.

I’ve written previously about the Dunbar number, a number which is apparently hardwired into our brains and creates an upper limit to the amount of people we can comfortably interact with in our lives. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now and the way we obviously structure relationships in our brain. We have so many aides now to help us store more information about a person and I suppose we don’t need to include that in whatever profile we have for those 150 people in our noggin. I’m wondering if we can increase the 147.8 towards 250 or 350 or 450 and still manage to have good relationships with them? I wonder are we doing this already anyway?

150 we can manage BUT only in communities where we all want to be that connected and are willing to work for it. Apparently Dunbar saw that groups of a large size like 150 spent 42% of their time social grooming in order to keep that group size alive but language brought that number down so there was not as much effort. Please Jesus tell me that poking and quiz spamming on Facebook is not social grooming. 🙂 Nice though that communications and sharing (in a sense) can help lessen the effort to maintain cohesion.

We don’t remember phone numbers anymore do we? Phones do that. Emails? Well email address structures are almost a standard now and the GMail contacts list helps us there too. Facebook and other social networks help too with all the fluffy details about a person: Birthday, education, stripper name etc. The world is becoming so connected too that our number of friends is probably increasing over generations so I wonder is part of our brain physically evolving too so that the number goes up? If language brought that 42% down a bit, what about social networks and technology? We can interact more efficiently now and store details of the interactions, leaving more space in that brain of ours.

Shel Israel in a recent post also was thinking about pushing this number up:

When I wrote the book outline, I estimated that the largest of these global neighborhoods would be no bigger than 150, a number I derived directly from Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point–a book you should still all read. But, technology has allowed that number to get larger. Perhaps 500 “friends can actually communicate with each other. But most neighborhoods are much smaller perhaps less than 15 members.

I tried my little experiment a little while back with Facebook where I messaged everyone I was connected with and tried to have proper conversations and tailored each message to the person and what I already knew about them. It wasn’t easy at all and by the end I was just sending almost generic messages to people but they were still ok I suppose though a lot shorter than the first that I sent. I learned a little about each person too. Funnily enough though I wonder do we have to seek out news from people now with all these activity walls and blogs. I have been in this conversation (of a sort):

“Any news? ” Yeah I was in Dublin today, bought some new shoes ” “Ah yeah, read that on your twitter or was it your Facebook or I dunno, one of your outlets” “Ah yeah, Facebook, how was the play, saw your review on the blog”…

So it does look like we are pushing that number up. I’d love though to see some kind of interaction chart for all of our online lives and personas. If Tumble blogs ran stats AND also logged the way we interact with our friends, it’d be great. GMail has frequently contacts listed, iTunes and our iPod and LastFM measure what we play most, it would be good to measure all forms of communication with people and chart it. We could see then are we seriously pushing that 150 limit. So why doesn’t someone create a Dunbar app for my phone, my email, my blog, my Facebook and my feedreader? Google would buy you easily.

So the next data wars are about who holds all our attention data, right? Right now Google is doing their best to grab on to this data by logging everything we do via all their services but they’re also giving us our search history, helping us find what we searched for before. Not for us really but for them and when that’s pointed out they do the whole big bad wolf “the better to see you m’dear”. M’yeahright. Sure it helps their search results but it also helps them profile you so they can serve better ads. Yes, they have profiles on us and while they are truthful in that they anonymize our surfing and search data after 18 months, what about the profiles? What about giving us back THAT data?

Then there’s Facebook who too are logging all our interactions with people and profiles. What are they deriving from all of that, would they care to share? No, I doubt it.

Google call this data derived data and while they are truthful about allowing you to export some of your data and just LOVE talking about not holding “user data hostage” the information those magnificent men in their googling machines derive is not given to us and they really don’t want to give that gold away. Lots of excuses why, of course:

“It’s general Google policy to try not hold user data hostage, and we on the Reader team try our best to abide by that. In this case, exporting of attention data is a rather murky concept since there doesn’t seem to be a commonly accepted format for it.

It also depends how to define attention data. You mentioned feed rank, but that’s something that’s computed based on your usage patterns, and thus could be considered derived data, not raw attention data. From what I can tell, at its lowest level attention data is every single action that you have done in an application”

It was in a past blog post here where I said that if we controlled our activity data, we could actually make money from search engines and the likes of Microsoft HealthVault, so there’s potential there. So I was quite interested when Mozilla announced Weave, their system which will store your Firefox preferences on their servers and when you install a new Firefox on a new computer, it can go to the Mozilla servers and download all your preferences and bookmarks. Great. And…

They are building APIs to allow access to it by yourself and others. Very interesting. Lots of great privacy and sharing options means you have full and granular control of your data. They are going with the slow and safe route but you can be sure that when all the bugs and issues are ironed out, your search data and surfing data will suddenly become available to share too. All opt-in too. Read more on their thoughts here. It seems they are taking the Amazon philosophy and encouraging clients and applications to be built on their services, meaning the complexity is up to outside developers while they’ll just offer neutral data moving and storage services. Good call.

This is a massively positive step for the ideas of Attention, the Database of Intentions and Vendor Relationship Marketing. Good one Moz. Think IE8 is about to get another code rewrite?