Technology blogger Robert Scoble wanted help moving contact information for his 5,000 Facebook friends into his Microsoft Outlook address book. He turned to Joseph Smarr, chief platform architect at Plaxo, a company in Mountain View, CA, that synchronizes contact information between Outlook, other desktop e-mail programs, and a number of Web services. Smarr gave Scoble a short program to test out, which automati­cally paged through Scoble's Facebook connections and extracted the names, birthdays, and e-mail addresses of his friends.

There was just one problem. The program triggered alerts at Facebook, which disabled Scoble's account. "My identity disappeared," Scoble says. "If I was your friend, I turned gray--all my information went gray. " Scoble was transformed from a man with a small town of Facebook friends into a nonperson.