Facebook just managed to run into a no-win situation. Scoble has been using an unnamed bot to scrape his data from Facebook. The result? Banishment for violating the terms of service.

There are plenty of reasons to object to Facebook's "death penalty" - rather than list them here, I suggest you have a look at the Techmem storm on the subject :) What's more interesting is the position this puts Facebook in. On the one hand, they are certainly justified in wanting to keep bots off their system - a badly written one that got wide use could give them no end of traffic problems. On the other hand, they now have an interesting PR issue: the leading Facebook fanboy has been summarily pitched overboard. - there's already a "Save Scoble" group, for instance:

Pity the poor Facebook PR person who gets this problem dumped in their lap - the data Scoble is after should be exportable from Facebook, even if the way he went about it is a violation of the terms of service. I expect that this stunt will force Facebook's hand, and they'll end up creating a standard way to do what Scoble was trying to do.

The stupid part of this is, Facebook should have seen this kind of thing coming. Eventually, someone with a megaphone was going to make an issue of the walled garden.

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