Web 2.0 Cataclysm: Scoble Abandons Facebook

Robert Scoble, Facebook minister-without-portfolio, is abandoning Facebook after his account was suspended for some amateurish data scraping attempts. I say “amateurish” only because he was caught — I have no idea what technology he was using to scan the Facebook site for data.

The wag would suggest that he needed more than 4,999 friends to feel socially accepted, but I doubt that. I think it’s more about how he wants 4,999 friends on 12 different social networks!

But seriously, this is a good point to take a stand on. If the time you’ve invested in creating your network isn’t recoverable should you want to move systems, why should you invest the time to begin with? Why not go with something more open (as in borders, not source code) and portable?

(h/t TechCrunch)

Technorati Tags: Facebook,Scoble

Amazon.com SimpleDB Laugher

Hm. Let’s see, a data service that doesn’t allow you to do joins. Ugh! Gack! Pfffftttht! And yet Scoble (or should I call him Scoble 2.0?) thinks it has the potential to kill off Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL in one swoop. Combined revenues for the three established players: like one trillion dollars. Scoble is eating the magic Web 2.0 mushrooms again.

Love this comment by Karim on Scobleizer.com, which includes this gem:

And charging people for CPU usage? Didn’t that die with punch cards? 1974 called and wants its pricing model back.

Over at TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld proves that he was a marketing major in college. Or he’s eating the same mushrooms that Scoble is. I’d like to take a moment to paraphrase the immortal Michael Corleone:

If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it’s that you should take starry-eyed blog posts about The Next Big Thing with a grain of salt.