JOHN NAUGHTON, THE NETWORKER, sinks his teeth into the Scoble debacle (a dust-up many in Ireland missed because of light work weeks between Christmas and Valentine's Day). Naughton says, "Watching Scoble in action is like taking a puppy for a walk. He is insatiably curious and he follows every lead, no matter how daft. When some new social networking service appears, you can bet he will overdose on it. He was a predictably early subscriber to Facebook, on which he rapidly acquired 5,000 'friends' (the maximum permitted by the service, apparently)." Naughton goes on to review the results of the Scoble Scraper Script, an electronic method of grabbing loads of information from an online site and a sure-fired way of getting banned from Facebook.
In his column, Naughton points to several useful outcomes of the Scoble brouhaha. "First, it has highlighted the speed with which the issue of privacy on social networking sites has become a can of worms." Naughton also highlights "the conflict between Facebook's walled garden and those who seek to make social networking sites inoperable, (i.e., able to share data)."
John Naughton -- "Why Facebook wants to corner the market in personal info" in The Observer, 6 January 2008.
