Facebook deletes 'super-user' Robert Scoble

The social media story bubbling this morning is that the blogger and social media pundit Robert '5000-friends' Robert Scoble has been kicked off Facebook and all traces of his account have been removed.

Facebook told him it was because he was running programmes on his Facebook account (which Facebook terms as illegal). We're not sure what kind of software, but it probably takes info from his friends and gives it to him in a shareable format. Here's what Mike Butcher at TechCrunch UK says on the story.

Question is, will Facebook care that the man who has more 'friends' than Facebook allows a user to have is angry at them? Or that his massive fan club now thinks Facebook is bad? Or will the long tail of millions of Facebook users with normal amounts of friends, the original Facebook users, the ones who don't know and would never care to know about Scoble and his club, always remain priority number one?

Watch and find out over on Techmeme as the discussion develops.

Comments

[Pete Gilbert]

I suspect you are right in that Facebook has enough impetus to keep rolling along with its huge number of users without the social media pundit approval. That was certainly the case with MySpace when that fell out of favour.

In my opinion Facebook isn't the final destination anyway, it was always going to be an interesting service station on the social networking motorway. The analogy is good, it was cheap and tacky but full of crap amusements and quite a lot of strange people. So a lot of people are going to be hitting the off-ramp looking for the next place down the road I suspect.

[Typos]

why is it that popular sites like digg and facebook do such things to its users without notice?
I think we need to raise such problems to the attention of public in a more official way...

[Mark Evans]

Like him or not, Scoble has huge clout within the tech community. If Facebook is smart, they should care about what he does and says. That said, you could easily make a point that Scoble did break Facebook's TOS, and he's looking for sympathy by publicizing his woes.

[Jonny Rosemont]

Controversial view but sometimes I feel like the tech community can be like a pack of werewolves. Mr Scoble has broken the site's terms of use so he was in the wrong and something should have been done...I don't think we can be too upset.

I do, however, agree with Typos that Facebook should have had a discussion with Robert first before making the drastic step of banning him. Facebook is a young company so it is prone to such errors, I just hope it doesn't continue to make them because it is the best social tool yet and it will be a shame that it goes wrong after all the time we've invested in it.

[centy]

I deleted my account the second I heard about it. The straw that broke the camals back, they are the biggest datafarmers anyway.