Facebook disables Robert's account

Looks like Facebook didn't appreciate Robert Scoble's attempt to scrape and download his personal information (including contacts) for use on other social networks. So, his New Year's gift from the network was to have his account disabled.

Some think it is a non-story: Someone breaks the Facebook TOS and gets banned. End of story. However, I think there is a much bigger issue here - one that Scoble knew about when he started scraping info from Facebook in the first place - and that is the issue of data ownership and portability.

Walled gardens like Facebook (and previously AOL) have always battled with this issue, and I believe Scoble knew he was attacking their Achilles heel when he did it.

The story is making waves today, and rightly so. In particular, Kara Swisher has a nice post. Others are here. And here's the link to the obligatory Facebook group lobbying to get him reinstated.

Technorati Tags: social.networks, privacy, data.portability, facebook, robert.scoble