Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

My favorite blog in the world has a post about the year to date downtime of various social networks which is revealing. Not a single one achieves the famous “three nines” uptime SLA (although Amazon’s S3 service offers a two nines 99.99% uptime guarantee).

Yahoo 360 isn’t a real social network, but it had great uptime

The best of these is Yahoo 360, with 99.9938% uptime over the last two months, followed by Myspace (99.969%), Facebook (99.8822%), Linked In (99.7024%), and finally Windows Live (99.4482%). MySpace was only down for 25m, while MSN Live Spaces had an embarrassing 7hrs 25m of downtime.

Scrabulous, the popular Scrabble clone, was announced dead earlier today by Mashable. With over 600,000 daily users, it caught the eye of Hasbro and Mattel who sent a takedown notice to Facebook.

The only problem, Mashable, is that I have been playing it today. Basically, the story is completely false; if Facebook did get a takedown request, it would be wiped out completely and not throwing errors / playable.

If you’ve been reading any tech news today, you probably heard that Robert Scoble was banned from Facebook for hacking it with an automated scraper to get his Facebook friends into Plaxo. Later today, Facebook reinstated his account after warning him to “refrain from running these types of scripts again.”

What was Scoble after? Your names, email addresses, and birthday. Information that he is allowed access to inside Facebook, but which his many of 5,000 so-called friends might not want hauled outside and stored with another company. Buzzmachine is right when they label him an identity thief in What he says:

I want Facebook to protect my email address. I don’t want Scoble downloading it and giving it over to Plaxo, a brand and company I will never, never trust and would never choose to do business with or hand data to on my own. So much of the reaction to this little incident gets it backwards; there has been much talk about how we should be able to get our data out of Facebook and that’s fine but we also need to protect our data from others making use of it without our permission and that’s what this is about in the end.

There’s a reason that I have set my privacy to avoid these things–in addition to defriending everyone I don’t actually know and trust. I don’t want people knowing where I live (as I’ve received death threats, prank calls, and various harassments that are more trouble to sort out then just avoid). I don’t want them knowing my email, phone number, or birthday. And I certainly would get pissed off to see someone harvesting them en-masse. As I wrote in Cornell violates mass student privacy, “Taken one-by-one, this kind of directory information is completely useless and publicly available. But when taken in aggregate form, the contact information is a secret.”

So, in mass-downloading his Facebook friends’ information, Scoble violated the Terms of Service, the implicit trust relationships he had with his Facebook friends, their privacy, and their identities. Now he claims that the information will be removed after their tests are finished, but at this point it’s too late. The cat (our identities) is out of the bag.

p.s., Techcrunch agrees as well…

According to Om Malik, Facebook needs $300 to $500 million in order to make its site safe for children to use:

The New York attorney general has started investigating the safety measures Facebook has put in place, and based on his preliminary investigations, he is not happy. His staff has found sexual predators and a wide variety of pornographic material, including images and videos, prompting him to issue a subpoena.

Unfortunately, I think the premise is ridiculous. Facebook provides a large number of privacy controls that would allow children to:

• Prevent people finding them in searches
• Prevent strangers from viewing their profile
• Prevent their profile from showing up in Google and other engines

I see Facebook as a piece of infrastructure, like a telephone address book and cellphone, that you find and communicate with people. Generally that lets friends talk to each other, or lonely people find other lonely people nearby; sometimes it lets perverted old men call up kids. The problem isn’t technological; it’s social, and perhaps medical.

Facebook and MySpace are just the tubes; what goes through them isn’t, and shouldn’t be, their concern.

So we all know that Facebook is going to let search engines start indexing parts of its member profiles so that it can cash in on vanity name traffic. This is all well and good, but one way Facebook could turn this from a PR prank into a serious feature would be allowing customization of your own profile by Network. That’s right–I want to show Search Engine visitors one thing, my friends another thing, my friends’ friends another, and something special for strangers and the people in my network.

So my friends would get to see this:

But I don’t want search engine visitors to see more than this:

You can, to some degree, use Facebook’s privacy controls to restrict information, but that’s slightly different than controlling its flow. New controls would let you seperate, for example, your friends and your girlfriend’s friends, or your personal life and professional profile. Facebook, put an end to “banking applicant has facebook profile of keg chugging,” please!