Should Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail block Facebook?
Apparently Facebook will ban you (or at least Robert Scoble) if you attempt to extract your friend's email addresses from the service. — Automated access is a difficult issue for any web service, so I won't argue with their decision — it's their service and they own you.
Context & Ripple Effects
Robert Scoble ran a script against Facebook to pull his friends' email addresses and had his account disabled under the site's Terms of Use — a ban confirmed on January 3, 2008 and picked up the same day by TechCrunch, Scripting News, Scobleizer, Publishing 2.0, and Marc's Voice, with TechCrunch's framing pointing at Plaxo's premature leak of the export effort. Paul Buchheit — who built Gmail — accepts Facebook's right to enforce ('it's their service and they own you') but flips the question: should the mailbox providers themselves block Facebook?
That flip matters because the address book sits on the other side of the wall. Facebook had already drawn trust scrutiny the day before by running users' profile pictures and endorsements into ads without explicit consent, so the Scoble ban lands amid a broader argument over who controls identity and relationships online — the network or the user.
First-order effects
- Scoble loses his Facebook account immediately, and anyone else running automated extraction scripts faces the same Terms-of-Use enforcement — the rule is now demonstrated, not theoretical.
- Facebook's position hardens: friend email addresses are off-limits to third-party tools like the one Scoble was testing, regardless of whose contacts they technically are.
Second-order effects
- Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Hotmail face a reciprocal decision Buchheit is forcing into the open — whether to treat Facebook as an untrusted counterparty for contact import/export, turning data portability into a bargaining chip between graph owners and mailbox holders.
- Third-party services building on social-graph exports (the Plaxo angle in TechCrunch's coverage) must either negotiate sanctioned access or accept ban risk, raising the cost of unsanctioned interoperability.
Third-order effects
- If enforcement-by-Terms-of-Service remains the default mechanism, contact-data disputes get settled unilaterally by platform operators rather than by standards or negotiation — entrenching the walled garden as the industry's structure.
- The episode sets up data portability as a recurring flashpoint: whichever side controls the export path (social network or mailbox provider) holds the leverage over users' relationship data.
The trend: Social networks are asserting proprietary control over the friend graph, pushing the fight over contact-data portability toward the email providers who hold the other half of every address book.