Morally, the data he wanted belongs to his friends rather than to him (nor Facebook). Facebook are entirely in the right for not providing programmatic access to the data in question. If Scoble wanted to do the right thing, he should have asked every one of them personally if they assent to his using their data in the manner that he intended.

Of course, that would have made his endeavour – benign as it may have been – completely impractical. What pity.

Leading a principled life is hard. A lot of the A-list crowd like to bloviate about morals and integrity and openness and the commons and all the shiny happy stuff… just so long as these principles don’t become an inconvenience, whereupon they are readily ignored and their violation loudly justified. Cf. the recent Lane Hartwell blow-up.

It’s working in some places already. I can use OPML to move my blog subscriptions to almost any feed reader, RSS or Atom to save (most of the information in) my blog postings and comments from most hosts, and the POP3 or IMAP protocols to get my e-mail off GMail (but there’s no way to get my address book). Much of that isn’t easy, though, and usually a new site won’t import an mbox or RSS/Atom file to let me move info over. OpenID sort-of works, but most of the big sites that provide OpenId logins won’t accept them from elsewhere. FOAF might work for social graphs, but I haven’t heard of any big site supporting it yet.

Of course if you upload data to other people’s servers, access to it is at their discretion, particularly if you have no contract whatsoever with them.

If he wanted the data, he should have kept a copy himself before uploading it.