Scoble blocked from Facebook

Well known tech blogger Robert Scoble has had his Facebook account disabled after he ran an unnamed script over it, breaking the site’s terms of use. As he says on his blog, he is appealing, but he Twittered that he will be taking the normal customer service route rather than contacting Facebook’s PR people, as he could certainly do (not that it will take long for the PR guys to notice). 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.” Here’s the email he received from Facebook, which he has published on his blog.

Hello,

Our systems indicate that you’ve been highly active on Facebook lately and viewing pages at a quick enough rate that we suspect you may be running an automated script. This kind of Activity would be a violation of our Terms of Use and potentially of federal and state laws.

As a result, your account has been disabled. Please reply to this email with a description of your recent activity on Facebook. In addition, please confirm with us that in the future you will not scrape or otherwise attempt to obtain in any manner information from our website except as permitted by our Terms of Use, and that you will immediately delete and not use in any manner any such information you may have previously obtained.

We reserve the right to take any appropriate action in connection with any activities that violate our Terms of Use and/or applicable laws, including termination of your account and pursuit of legal remedies.

Please reply to this email.

Thank you,
Facebook Customer Support

Update: He now says he plans to support Dataportability.org, the open standards stack for the ubiquitous sharing and remixing of data.

Update II: Ironically there is now a Facebook group supporting his re-instatement. And if you’d like to see what Scoble would look like as a revolutionary, check this out.