Social Media Top 5: Don’t Scrape Me, Bro! Edition

1. In the Robert Scoble/Facebook brouhaha, the social media community has spoken: “Facebook, you don’t own our data. Our info belongs to…Plaxo?” It’s unfortunate that Scoble’s run-in with Facebook involved his use of new Plaxo software to scrape profile information. The ability to carry our data– including the people in our network– is interesting. The presence of a company (Plaxo) that had only begun to rehabilitate its image as an unwelcome intruder in our email inboxes constantly asking us for contact information skews the perceptions in the debate.

2. Other side of the coin: those of us who join social networks gleefully enter lots of contact information, such as emails, cell numbers, and sometimes things even more sensitive and personal. We also agitate for easier ways to take our data from one network to another, but frequently scream if we think another company might want to do something with the data. Our data is gold. We should demand reasonable terms of service, but we should also expect that just because we don’t pay money for something does not mean it is free.

3. In other Scoble news, he was kicked out of a local Safeway last week after using a scanner to try to capture the nutritional information from the entire breakfast cereal aisle.

4. Now that actual voting has begun, we are seeing that the political candidates really don’t care about using social media. If this means we are spared a new Hillary Clinton song contest, I’m willing to wait until 2012 for a Social Media President.

5. CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, is this week. Can we top last year’s unquestioned highlight, which was undoubtedly either the tasering of Amanda Congdon on ABCNews.com, or the introduction of the iPhone (wait, that wasn’t at CES?)?

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