Now we find out that Scoble's little social experiment was actually a test by Plaxo. I said earlier that the scraping was not a good thing after seeing Dare Obasanjo's comments. Mike Arrington has a complete rundown on things, including the culprit: Plaxo. Apparently, Plaxo was using Scoble as a prominent "Facebook can't screw him" guinea pig. Which reminds me - this has been a long term play by Plaxo. Last summer, Scoble was invited to Plaxo, and did a video with them, saying this:
I really want to love the new Plaxo. The 18-minute demo I got last week is awesome — see it embedded above. They’ve completely rebuilt the system from scratch and removed the reliance on Outlook and the negative “send spam to your friends” kind of stuff.
So putting it all together, Plaxo spent a long time cultivating Scoble - so they could play him. I think we found the bad guy here, and it's not Facebook. Looks like Scoble let his enthusiasm run ahead of him, and he got burned.
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