July/August 2008
Who Owns Your Friends?
Social-networking sites are fighting over control of users' personal information.
By Erica Naone
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Joseph Smarr, chief platform architect at Plaxo.
Credit: Toby Burditt |
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.
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