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Joseph Smarr, chief platform architect at Plaxo.
Credit: Toby Burditt
Social-networking sites are fighting over control of users' personal information.
Technology blogger Robert Scoble wanted help moving contact information for his 5,000 Facebook friends into his Microsoft Outlook address book. He turned to Joseph Smarr, chief platform architect at Plaxo, a company in Mountain View, CA, that synchronizes contact information between Outlook, other desktop e-mail programs, and a number of Web services. Smarr gave Scoble a short program to test out, which automatically paged through Scoble's Facebook connections and extracted the names, birthdays, and e-mail addresses of his friends.
There was just one problem. The program triggered alerts at Facebook, which disabled Scoble's account. "My identity disappeared," Scoble says. "If I was your friend, I turned gray--all my information went gray. " Scoble was transformed from a man with a small town of Facebook friends into a nonperson.
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