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Facebook deleted Robert Scoble’s profile because he was running an automated script to export his contacts. This is today’s big story…….or is it?

The real story here is data portability. It’s an issue that has been bubbling up under the surface with the rise of social networking. When you spend the time creating a network of friends on facebook, professional contacts on LinkedIn, and micro-buddies in Twitter, the question becomes: who owns the connecting links? And what happens if they go away?

The Scoble-Facebook dilemma of, well, this morning has really served to highlight some important “I spent all this time building this and now I want to bring my connections with me” issues.

From TechCrunch:

Data portability from social networks is going to become a huge tech industry issue in the new year. Why? Because well known tech blogger Robert Scoble has had his Facebook account disabled after he tried to pull out his 5,000 contacts (known as a social graph) from the site. This will fire the starting gun on all the debates about who owns your data on a social network, debates which - till now - have seemed rather theoretical, and could even lead to a revolt amongst some Facebook users.

Scoble ran an unnamed script over his account, breaking the site’s terms of use. As he says on his blog, he is appealing, and although he Twittered that will be taking the normal customer service route rather than contacting Facebook’s PR people, the storm that is brewing will not take long to reach Facebook’s most senior people. Scoble says he was using the script from an unnamed company since he is working with them to “move my social graph to other places and that isn’t allowable under Facebook’s terms of service.”

From Matthew Ingram:

The big question here — which the Scobleizer has cleverly put himself at the centre of — is: Who does that data belong to? It might have been collected and organized in the way it has because of Facebook’s tools, and he obviously agreed to the terms of use that he has since broken, but there’s no question that the information itself should belong to Scoble (and the rest of us). So what rights should he have when it comes to removing that data from a site like Facebook? And who gets to decide?

The bottom line, I think, is that Facebook should make it easier for people to move their data from Facebook to somewhere else without scraping the site using bot-scripts. Whether Scoble’s symbolic gesture will help to push them in that direction remains to be seen.

From Kara Swisher in BoomTown:

In this case, as Scoble wrote in a blog post today, the fight with Facebook is over an effort he has been making with DataPortability.org, which notes on its Web site that “our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen tools or vendors.”

Such activity–which Facebook characterizes as “scraping”–is not allowed under its Terms of Use.

More to the point, such an ability would be damaging to Facebook’s business plan around building a robust ad business. The success of that squarely relies on people staying and actively using the service because they have committed time and effort in putting up scads of information, photos, videos about themselves on the service, as well as establishing a complex and personally valuable network of friends.

It looks like we’ll be hearing a lot about data portability in the days and weeks to come, and I can’t tell you how excited I am to hear it.

Filed under: Uncategorized, facebook, social media