[swalsh]

The problem with a lot of these sites (facebook/linkedin) etc is their business is built on data you provided, which they then get to control.

The problem is additional data gets built up, and they gain a monopoly on the information. It results in an unfair market. For me to build a competitor to facebook or linkedin would be very difficult. Even if its better!

I'd like to see a law about user obtained data, that requires it always be programatically accessible.

[logn]

It's called fair use but people have this idea that Robots.txt was a bill passed by Congress. But yes, I totally agree, and sites like Stack Overflow are doing this very well. It's a shame that Archive.org was not allowed to crawl my profile before I left last year but that they allowed Google/Bing/etc to crawl it.