4 ms·

What is the exact problem here? The Creative Commons license was intended to allow such use, and Facebook reached out to wikipedia beforehand. Unlike some shad

by kmavm 16y ago

What is the exact problem here? The Creative Commons license was intended to allow such use, and Facebook reached out to wikipedia beforehand. Unlike some shadier uses of this, the community pages contain direct attribution to wikipedia, and direct links to edit the content. See here: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/21721 http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/21721

starnix17 16y ago
I don't think there are any problems with it from a legal standpoint. I just feel that it's a good example of how Facebook is trying to build a walled garden of content.
- natrius 16y ago
  Walled garden? You don't have to log in to see those pages, so I don't get it.
  - gamache 16y ago
    At best, what you see is as useful as a Google cache of the Wikipedia page. It is non-editable, and quite possibly out of date compared to the actual content. Its only purpose is to encourage communities -- er, sorry, I mean to mine a new vein of customer information to sell upstream.
    - natrius 16y ago
      The pages make other parts of Facebook more useful. Before these pages, you had to Google people's interests to find out what they were if you didn't already know, and if the results were ambiguous, you'd have to do something crazy like actually ask the person directly. Now interests are well-defined. Sure, the solution they picked gives them ulterior SEO benefits, but to compare it to Mahalo and suggest that it's useless doesn't make any sense.
jacquesm 16y ago
It just pollutes the web with content that is available in a better form elsewhere. I'm sure it's legal, but really, if I want to know about ruby I really don't need to get the facebook fake community page. It looks like most if not all of those so called communities were simply bot generated spam pages. In one fell swoop facebook has de-valuated all the other communities it hosts and a whole bunch of search results. Or do you think that someone actually made a facebook 'rapid application development' group, or one for 'business process models'?
- ivenkys 16y ago
  "It just pollutes the web with content that is available in a better form elsewhere." - A lot of this already happens with aggregator sites, blog posts,auto-generated link bait sites etc. so this is nothing really new , so FB is only adding to the noise. The scary part i suppose is the scale of it. If FB does this for everything and it gets searched/cached by the search-engines , we are going to have to start looking at results from the 5th page onwards.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    > we are going to have to start looking at results from the 5th page onwards. Yes, that is exactly what I meant by pollution.
- rbanffy 16y ago
  > It just pollutes the web That's a very apt description of 90% of Facebook. I really don't need to receive reports about how my friend's farms are going.
cookiecaper 16y ago
The problem is that Facebook is scraping data from Wikipedia, your email provider, and probably other locations, but pursuing criminal charges for a startup that scrapes data from them as "criminal computer trespass".

by kmavm 16y ago

starnix17 16y ago

I don't think there are any problems with it from a legal standpoint. I just feel that it's a good example of how Facebook is trying to build a walled garden of content.

natrius 16y ago
Walled garden? You don't have to log in to see those pages, so I don't get it.
- gamache 16y ago
  At best, what you see is as useful as a Google cache of the Wikipedia page. It is non-editable, and quite possibly out of date compared to the actual content. Its only purpose is to encourage communities -- er, sorry, I mean to mine a new vein of customer information to sell upstream.
  - natrius 16y ago
    The pages make other parts of Facebook more useful. Before these pages, you had to Google people's interests to find out what they were if you didn't already know, and if the results were ambiguous, you'd have to do something crazy like actually ask the person directly. Now interests are well-defined. Sure, the solution they picked gives them ulterior SEO benefits, but to compare it to Mahalo and suggest that it's useless doesn't make any sense.

jacquesm 16y ago

It just pollutes the web with content that is available in a better form elsewhere. I'm sure it's legal, but really, if I want to know about ruby I really don't need to get the facebook fake community page. It looks like most if not all of those so called communities were simply bot generated spam pages. In one fell swoop facebook has de-valuated all the other communities it hosts and a whole bunch of search results. Or do you think that someone actually made a facebook 'rapid application development' group, or one for 'business process models'?

ivenkys 16y ago
"It just pollutes the web with content that is available in a better form elsewhere." - A lot of this already happens with aggregator sites, blog posts,auto-generated link bait sites etc. so this is nothing really new , so FB is only adding to the noise. The scary part i suppose is the scale of it. If FB does this for everything and it gets searched/cached by the search-engines , we are going to have to start looking at results from the 5th page onwards.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  > we are going to have to start looking at results from the 5th page onwards. Yes, that is exactly what I meant by pollution.
rbanffy 16y ago
> It just pollutes the web That's a very apt description of 90% of Facebook. I really don't need to receive reports about how my friend's farms are going.

cookiecaper 16y ago

The problem is that Facebook is scraping data from Wikipedia, your email provider, and probably other locations, but pursuing criminal charges for a startup that scrapes data from them as "criminal computer trespass".