Marc's Voice

APIs versus Scraping - an industry in transition

Turns out the reason why Facebook sued Power.com - the Brazilian based social network ‘utility’ - was that they were scraping Facebook for profile and activity data.

This is a key event in our industry as it highlights a transition of inter-site connectivity from scraping to utilzing APIs. Scraping can give a vendor access to any data that appears on the screen, which is why Facebook only displays user’s email addresses as bitmaps.

APIs give vendors the full flexibility they desire, but Facebook limits their legal rights to do anything but what Facebook wishes to grant them.  So Facebook Connect comes long with a long list of do’s and don’ts and storing user’s usernames and passwords is one of the don’ts.

The Microsoft folks have said publicly that the main reason they’ve opened up their Windows Live web services is that ‘folks were scraping anyway‘ - why not let them get at their data in a better way?’  Its this kind of logic which keeps Micrsoft in the game - year after year.

MySpace succumbed to the ‘open juggernaut’ and is now leading the way with all sorts of levels of openness.  Yahoo appears to embracing openness - mainly cause they don’t have anything else.

But it sure would be great if vendors started to embrace openness for the value it brings to their users, not because of some turf war or what John McCrea calls “the On-line Identity Wars”.

So Power.com has come out and said that they will use Facebook Connect and that they didn’t want to store user’s userbnames and passwords anyway.

We have been in discussions with Facebook to get their feedback on the best ways to work with them. Facebook would like sites to use Facebook Connect and they are continually open and available for feedback and comments on how to expand Facebook connects functionality. We support mutual industry cooperation to help responsibly create a borderless web. We are working with feedback from Facebook to implement Facebook connect inside of Power. We are also offering Facebook feedback on how to enhance and improve Facebook Connect functionality and will be launching a newer version of Power using Facebook connect in late January.

Power.com is focused on providing value added services to social network users and it is not necessary for us to store the users name and password if a site prefers that we don’t.

To build on this focus, we will be shortly announcing and introducing a new standard to the the industry called Social InterConnect that will allow users to freely share their account information for any site with any other site without the host site needing to store the username and password. Power.com will provide this option to all sites for whom we collect account information inside of Power.com and will support existing social networks which already offer a solution such as Facebook connect.

Oh goodey - I can’t wait to see Social InterConnect.

So I wonder if the Power.com people will be at the DiSO Activity Streams meetup today at SixApart.

You know the wonderful thing about standards - is that there are so many of them.

Now that Power.com is funded by Draper and Esther Dyson do we think that dataportability, distributed social networking and the Open Stack will be accepted by the VC community?

Only if it makes them money.

Do any of these folks (Power.com or their VCs) care about user’s data, their rights to their own data and behavior histories or user’s rights in general?  I doubt it.

But this does signify a moment in history where it’s clear vendors can MAKE MONEY off of providing user’s the featuires they want. And if the user’s want openness - by god - then we’re gonna give them openness.

Now I wonder what Power.com’s business model is?  Ads?

I only wish that there were other obvious reasons why openness can benefit social networking vendors.  It’s obvious to me, but then again - I’m not waking up in the morning trying to figure out how to exploit and squeeze money from users.

Cooperating and working together will benefit vendors and users alike once we get past these walled gardens and locked in strategies - which has been happening over the past year - year and a half.

Its just interesting to see Facebook (sitting on top of the hill) file lawsuits and defend their turf, when the  writing is on the wall for them to “open up that final 2%”.