Prominent tech blogger Robert Scobles account has been disabled after an attempt by Scoble to download his Facebook contacts onto his personal computer. Scoble announced in Thursday, December 28 blog post that he was attempting to download the content from his Facebook profile to other places, a download that is not allowed under Facebooks terms and conditions of service agreement.



Scoble said that he was using an unreleased feature of a social network based email address book, Plaxo Pulse, in order to import names, email addresses, and birthdays.

This importer did not look at anything else, wrote Scoble, Just this stuff, no personal information. I wanted to get all my contacts into my Microsoft Outlook address book and hook them up with the Plaxo system, which 12,800 of my friends are already on. Its ironic that you can import your Gmail address book into Facebook but you cant export back out.

On the Facebook front, a group that formed to protest Scobles exclusion from the social network had 100 members in less than a week, prompting Mike Butcher, a blogger with TechCrunch UK, to predict that the portability of data on social networks will be a big issue in 2008. According to Butcher, the disabling of Scobles Facebook account will fire the starting gun on all debates about who owns your data on a social network, debates which, until now, have seemed rather theoretical.

In a blog post, co-founder and CEO of Faraday media, an organizer of the data portability group Plaxo, said that he welcomed the debate, which tech professionals and IT specialists theorize will become one of the biggest issues concerning social networks in 2008.

We own our social graph data, and we also own all our other data. We all know that this is just the latest in a long line of problems that are emerging in 2008 and beyond, so its great to have Scobleizer championing the cause for all of the standards groups out there. Now with Robert and the other great bloggers on our side helping to spread the word we have a real chance of helping each of the standards communities get the level of adoption they deserve by putting this all in end-to-end context.

According to ComputerWorld, an email form Facebooks customer service team that Scoble posted on his blog, said that it had determined that Scoble was viewing pages at a quick enough rate that we suspect you may be running an automated script.