DAVOS, SWITZERLAND and REUTERS AUDITORIUM - Robert Scoble, today in the shape of RobertScoble Sopwith, returned to Second Life for the first time in about eighteen months after he was banned for allowing his twelve year old son to use his Second Life account. Scoble simple stated that after the event, “I just never went back.” He went on to explain that for him, part of the fun of Second Life was the things he could do with his son. His son moved on to World of Warcraft, and Scoble focused on other issues.

One issue he spoke about was his recent banning from Facebook. Scoble was working with a firm to test ways of extracting data from Facebook. Running the script against Scoble’s 5000 friends in Facebook was enough to set off alarms about possible violations of Facebook’s Terms of Service.

Scoble’s account was disabled. While he recognizes Facebook’s interest in protecting its community from spammers, he expressed concern that when Facebook takes action, it is unilateral. There is no recourse. There is no appeal committee to go to. There is no due process.

This sounds similar to concerns that Second Life residents express about actions by Linden Lab when there is an accusation of abuse or when someone receives, often unknowingly, funds that may have been obtained illegally.

This raises an important issue for social network providers. Who owns your data in Facebook or in Second Life? What should be allowed in terms of people accessing and extracting that data?

Fleep Tuque asked Mr. Scoble about the top three things he would change if he were head of U.S. Department of Education. Mr. Scoble talked about the importance of cellphones as a technology. He talked about the lack of technology support in our schools, saying that in our school systems there is one technology person for every 60,000 people. In business, there is one technology person for every fourteen people. With cellphones, he observed, there comes a built in IT infrastructure. So, his key recommendation would be to accelerate the adoption of cellphones in school.

At this point, the discussion veered toward cellphones. There were comments about the user interface of the iPhone and how people use it more like they use a hand held videogame instead of the way people use the clunky interface of so many other cellphones. Mr. Scoble was using a Nokia N95, which he believes has great features but not the same level of usability as the iPhone. However, he expressed doubts that Nokia will sit by and allow Apple to dominate the cellphone user interface space.