The Business Web 2.0
As CEO of business-based social networking site WeCanDo.BIZ, read my take on the role Web 2.0 technologies can play helping businesses to grow.
Thursday 2 April 2009, 12:18 PM
LinkedIn and the one way street on social graph portability
Has a "cease and desist" notice to a niche social network inadvertently revealed LinkedIn's hand regarding the Social Web and contact portability?
I am not one to wash my dirty linen in public, but my company has been on the receiving end of a "cease and desist" notice from LinkedIn that may throw some light on its views on social graph portability; and it might explain why the professional social networking site isn't rushing to support Facebook Connect, OpenID, OAuth or any other of the data portability standards that the rest of the social web is embracing and already deploying...
It's fairly common practice on social networks to be able to fetch existing contact lists from e-mail systems and other social networks so users can connect to people they already know quickly and easily. I am sure you've seen such tools and also probably used them. Facebook offers it, so does MySpace, Twitter, Xing, Hi5, Friendfeed and even LinkedIn itself. It's normally how you start off your presence on a such sites so you have a network to start off with.
As a network for sales leads and business referrals we also offer this capability at WeCanDo.BIZ, using a third party tool also used by many of the above (from Octazen, which list many of the biggest social networks as clients on its website at http://www.ocatzen.com). The tool collects the login credentials for your webmail and then fetches your contacts so that it can match e-mail addresses with those registered on the network, automatically as them as "friends". Elegant it ain't, but ahead of the mass adoption of standards for data portability it's a method used by all.
One of the aims of Google, Facebook and others is to make the ability to move around the web with your contact list -- or "social graph" -- simpler and more secure. Such iniatives are getting there slowly, probably helped rather than hindered by some healthy competition on "standards" for doing this; the main protagonists being Facebook Connect and OpenID. Google and Plaxo recently showed a great way of connecting with your Plaxo contacts on potentially any other site with a community when they demonstrated a hybrid of OpenID, OAuth and Google Contacts at the OpenID Experience meeting hosted by Facebook a month ago. Others are looking into the same technology and the time where web users have a single user identity and a social graph of contacts which is used over and over on a whole load of different sites can't be that far away.
But in spite of a large number of movers and shakers in social networking being present at the meeting and supportive of the standards based technologies -- and many web properties are already offering limited data portability on their sites, be that with OpenID derivatives or Facebook Connect -- LinkedIn has not added any such capability to its own site yet. It's a big player in social networking so I was wondering about when it would show its intent on portability of contacts this week when we received a letter from their lawyers, which might give us the answers.
In short, they're upset that we use the Octazen tool to enable our users to fetch the e-mail addresses of their LinkedIn contacts so they can also connect with them on our site. To be perfectly clear, LinkedIn offers exactly the same functionality on its own site so its users can collect e-mail addresses from Google Mail, AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and others (if you are a LinkedIn user you can see it here: https://www.linkedin.com/secure/uploadContacts?displayWebMail=&trk=inv_webmail&goback=.cnt_false_0_0). But it doesn't like us doing it and wants us to stop.
As much as it has benefited over the past six years from its users inviting their existing contacts to connect with them on the site -- it had managed to win over 15 million users before it even had a marketing department -- it seems not to be so willing to allow use of the same tools elsewhere on the web. It is clear in its letter to us that it considers contact "scraping" to be bad and against its terms of use. It supports this by quoting some Californian statute that would appear to suggest that ALL social networks using such tools are doing so illegaly (maybe it should check out clause 5.3 of Google's terms of use at http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS?hl=en which says the same thing and which use of LinkedIn's contact importer would appear to breach).
At a time when social networks and other web giants like Google and Yahoo are attempting to tear down the walls between sites to make your social graph truly portable, LinkedIn is supporting methods for doing this where it gains e-mail addresses from the practice, but isn't so keen to see the data flowing both ways. If it succeeds in stopping us using such tools, will this mean that LinkedIn also has to stop the practice, as well as Facebook, Twitter and all others?
All this comes at a time when LinkedIn is demonstrating no more sophisticated and standards based methods for support portable contacts or unified login as an alternative to the methods is uses which it considers unsafe. It remains one of the few big social networks that seems to be doing nothing to take down the "walled garden" through use of technologies like OpenID and OAuth and trails way behind Facebook, MySpace and Plaxo in this area. If it forces all sites to stop using contact importers as we currently all use, what will happen to those sites that aren't effectively supporting standards based data portability, LinkedIn included?
Even WeCanDo.BIZ (11,000 members as opposed to LinkedIn's 30 million) will be adding support for MySpaceID, Facebook Connect and OpenID in the next month. We believe it is the future of the web and I've been blogging that view for nearly a year. LinkedIn's actions means we'll probably prioritise this work higher. But because LinkedIn itself doesn't support the standards, even then our users won't be able to bring the social graph information over from LinkedIn. This hardly seems fair when LinkedIn continues to benefit so much from its hapless users uploading their own contact lists.
I am sure LinkedIn considers its beef with us to be specific and individual, but has it inadvertently revealed its broader intentions as far as support for a truly Social Web?
I'd love to read your thoughts.
If you want to read more on the specifics of LinkedIn's issue with our contact importer, check out our site blog at http://wecandobiz.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/linkedin-wecandobiz-portable-contacts-and-data-retention/.
I am not one to wash my dirty linen in public, but my company has been on the receiving end of a "cease and desist" notice from LinkedIn that may throw some light on its views on social graph portability; and it might explain why the professional social networking site isn't rushing to support Facebook Connect, OpenID, OAuth or any other of the data portability standards that the rest of the social web is embracing and already deploying...
It's fairly common practice on social networks to be able to fetch existing contact lists from e-mail systems and other social networks so users can connect to people they already know quickly and easily. I am sure you've seen such tools and also probably used them. Facebook offers it, so does MySpace, Twitter, Xing, Hi5, Friendfeed and even LinkedIn itself. It's normally how you start off your presence on a such sites so you have a network to start off with.
As a network for sales leads and business referrals we also offer this capability at WeCanDo.BIZ, using a third party tool also used by many of the above (from Octazen, which list many of the biggest social networks as clients on its website at http://www.ocatzen.com). The tool collects the login credentials for your webmail and then fetches your contacts so that it can match e-mail addresses with those registered on the network, automatically as them as "friends". Elegant it ain't, but ahead of the mass adoption of standards for data portability it's a method used by all.
One of the aims of Google, Facebook and others is to make the ability to move around the web with your contact list -- or "social graph" -- simpler and more secure. Such iniatives are getting there slowly, probably helped rather than hindered by some healthy competition on "standards" for doing this; the main protagonists being Facebook Connect and OpenID. Google and Plaxo recently showed a great way of connecting with your Plaxo contacts on potentially any other site with a community when they demonstrated a hybrid of OpenID, OAuth and Google Contacts at the OpenID Experience meeting hosted by Facebook a month ago. Others are looking into the same technology and the time where web users have a single user identity and a social graph of contacts which is used over and over on a whole load of different sites can't be that far away.
But in spite of a large number of movers and shakers in social networking being present at the meeting and supportive of the standards based technologies -- and many web properties are already offering limited data portability on their sites, be that with OpenID derivatives or Facebook Connect -- LinkedIn has not added any such capability to its own site yet. It's a big player in social networking so I was wondering about when it would show its intent on portability of contacts this week when we received a letter from their lawyers, which might give us the answers.
In short, they're upset that we use the Octazen tool to enable our users to fetch the e-mail addresses of their LinkedIn contacts so they can also connect with them on our site. To be perfectly clear, LinkedIn offers exactly the same functionality on its own site so its users can collect e-mail addresses from Google Mail, AOL, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and others (if you are a LinkedIn user you can see it here: https://www.linkedin.com/secure/uploadContacts?displayWebMail=&trk=inv_webmail&goback=.cnt_false_0_0). But it doesn't like us doing it and wants us to stop.
As much as it has benefited over the past six years from its users inviting their existing contacts to connect with them on the site -- it had managed to win over 15 million users before it even had a marketing department -- it seems not to be so willing to allow use of the same tools elsewhere on the web. It is clear in its letter to us that it considers contact "scraping" to be bad and against its terms of use. It supports this by quoting some Californian statute that would appear to suggest that ALL social networks using such tools are doing so illegaly (maybe it should check out clause 5.3 of Google's terms of use at http://www.google.com/accounts/TOS?hl=en which says the same thing and which use of LinkedIn's contact importer would appear to breach).
At a time when social networks and other web giants like Google and Yahoo are attempting to tear down the walls between sites to make your social graph truly portable, LinkedIn is supporting methods for doing this where it gains e-mail addresses from the practice, but isn't so keen to see the data flowing both ways. If it succeeds in stopping us using such tools, will this mean that LinkedIn also has to stop the practice, as well as Facebook, Twitter and all others?
All this comes at a time when LinkedIn is demonstrating no more sophisticated and standards based methods for support portable contacts or unified login as an alternative to the methods is uses which it considers unsafe. It remains one of the few big social networks that seems to be doing nothing to take down the "walled garden" through use of technologies like OpenID and OAuth and trails way behind Facebook, MySpace and Plaxo in this area. If it forces all sites to stop using contact importers as we currently all use, what will happen to those sites that aren't effectively supporting standards based data portability, LinkedIn included?
Even WeCanDo.BIZ (11,000 members as opposed to LinkedIn's 30 million) will be adding support for MySpaceID, Facebook Connect and OpenID in the next month. We believe it is the future of the web and I've been blogging that view for nearly a year. LinkedIn's actions means we'll probably prioritise this work higher. But because LinkedIn itself doesn't support the standards, even then our users won't be able to bring the social graph information over from LinkedIn. This hardly seems fair when LinkedIn continues to benefit so much from its hapless users uploading their own contact lists.
I am sure LinkedIn considers its beef with us to be specific and individual, but has it inadvertently revealed its broader intentions as far as support for a truly Social Web?
I'd love to read your thoughts.
If you want to read more on the specifics of LinkedIn's issue with our contact importer, check out our site blog at http://wecandobiz.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/linkedin-wecandobiz-portable-contacts-and-data-retention/.
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