Why can't MySocial Network Program Be My Address Book

Michael Arrington today wrote about the debacle of Robert Scoble being thrown off of Facebook. Allen Stern over at CenterNetworks also writes about it.

The reason Robert was thrown off is that he was running a script provided by Plaxo for extracting email addresses from contacts in Facebook. This is apparently a violation of Facebook's terms of service.

Who is to blame here is really not of that much interest to me. The bigger question to me is really a more existential question. What are social networks for?

The problem is that the social networks, other than Plaxo, are really not set up as personal address books. This is really a problem because, in an ideal world, everyone really *does* want one address book. It makes total sense that you would want to have your contacts in your cell phone, and in your local address book, and in the cloud. You really would like one central place for your data, and then rules for what you can do.

The problem is that social networks as we know them have really been designed for play, and not to model real world relationships. For example there really should be a seamless relationship between my social network and my address book. And while Michael makes the point that it should be up to the owner of the email address whether you should be able to copy it, this feels a little odd. Does that mean you can *see* my email address but not *use* it? Or does it mean that if I type one my "friends" email addresses into Gmail manually then that is OK, but I can't use a script to grab it for me?

To me what makes most sense is that you can either send me things through the network without having my actual email address, or you have access to my email address. There is really no logical middle ground. It seems reasonable for me to prevent others from getting my email. But it does not seem reasonable that if I allow my email address to be visible, that you cant easily grab them and move them into Outlook.

Of course this kind of flexibility doesn't work for Facebook because they just don't want any of your social network data leaving. To me, if you have my email you have my email, whether I have to manually type it into an email program or not.

Clearly, it will become harder and harder for information vendors to control how users use the data that they store on behalf of their customers. The solution to this problem is a core piece of what I am working on now. I don't believe that the idea of common import/export formats of the type under the dataportability.org umbrella is enough. While those standards are great and important, there is, in my view, a much better way.