The Facebook Vote

The Facebook Site Governance Vote is up, so I thought it was about time I sum up the “Facebook experience” as I have come to call it.
(if you don’t know what I am talking about you can read this)
For more information on the vote, please read Mark Zuckerberg’s blog post.

I have received many questions about why I think my group went viral and why it grew so rapidly, when there were at least two other groups that didn’t.
One very important factor is that I was first. Secondly I had a big portion of luck.

Furthermore, what I had that the other two group administrators didn’t have, was a huge network *outside* of Facebook that I could tap into.
The two other groups were started by Facebook members, using Facebook only to promote their groups. This of course almost limits them to status updates and writing their friends personally. I, on the other hand, had my blog, twitter and Facebook as tools.
Facebook is a walled garden, blogs and twitter aren’t.
I would for instance search for FacebookToS on twitter and send a tweet to everyone who mentioned it encouraging them join my group. This allowed me to reach people whom I didn’t already know, and through the re-tweet mechanism they all forwarded it to their friends in their networks and so on. The social amplifier.

Lastly, I had mainstream media.
The case was picked up from the Norwegian newspapers already on the first day of the campaign. Norway has 1,5 million users on Facebook. On the second night of the campaign the US mainstream media jumped on the bandwagon and the group was mentioned in the morning news on CNN and later on the Situation Room.

Some numbers.
One of my Facebook links on twitter was clicked 1,346 times. I had two more but unfortunately don’t have any stats for these.
Dennis Howlett who blogged about the incident here, here, here and here on 3 different blogs, had 23,000 page views on those posts.
(thank you, Dennis!)
I at the time had 742 followers on twitter, Dennis had 2,923.
I had about 400 friends on Facebook.

Facebook contacted me very early on, letting me know they were on the case, and have kept me in the loop ever since. And it has been a great experience to be part of the process.

So what has actually been going on behind the doors?
Facebook has read every post and discussion on the Bill of Rights / ToS groups, noted the users concerns and questions and tried to answer these with the new documents. I am not sure how much of this I can blog about, so I will just say that Facebook has really done a phenomenal job in making sure everyone’s interests are taken care of. (thank you Barry for the behind-the-scenes work)

The vote ends on April 23, 2009 at 11:59am (PDT) and will be binding if 30% or more of all active users (an active user is someone who has logged in to the site in the past 30 days) vote. Which means somewhere around 70 million users need to vote.
So far 55,179 users have casted their votes.

Statement of Rights and Responsibilites
Response to Comments from users and experts on the Proposed Statement of Rights and Responsibiliteis:
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=183535615300

Statement of Rights and Responsibilities:
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=183538190300

Facebook Principles
Response to Comments from users and experts on the Proposed Facebook Principles:
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=183539710300

Facebook Principles:
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=183540865300

Current Terms:
http://www.facebook.com/terms.php

Facebook Site Governance Page:
http://www.facebook.com/fbsitegovernance

This Is Pretty Ironic

This just made me laugh. I am now blocked from sending messages on Facebook due to what they call an “overuse of the feature”.
Being admin on a 130,000+ member group means receiving loads of messages every day, and I have done my best to answer every single personally.
I guess it was time for me to take a break or something..

“Facebook has determined that you were sending messages at a rate that is likely to be abusive. Please note that these blocks can last anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Unfortunately, we cannot lift the block for you.

When you are allowed to resume sending messages, keep in mind that it’s possible to run into a block based on how many messages you send and how fast you send them. It’s also possible to be blocked when either starting a new message thread or replying to a message. Lastly, deleting old messages will not allow you to send more messages. In the future, please proceed with caution to avoid hitting the limit again. Please be aware that further abuse of such features can result in your account being permanently disabled. ”

The Reply From Facebook

Barry Schnitt, a Facebook spokesperson, posted a reply on the “People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS)” group, which I think everyone should read.

Hi everyone,

First, I want to apologize for the delay in response. It’s been a long day with lots of interesting and constructive discussions. Second, I want to thank you for your questions and concerns. As Mark expressed in his blog post on Monday, it was never our intention to confuse people or make them uneasy about sharing on Facebook. I also want to be very clear that Facebook does not, nor have we ever, claimed ownership over people’s content. Your content belongs to you.

We do need certain licenses in order to facilitate the sharing of your content through our service. That’s where the Terms of Use come in. The fact that you’ve raised the questions you have is proof that we haven’t done a good job explaining these licenses in the actual language of the document. In fact, as we were working to answer your questions, we realized the new version of the Terms might technically permit some of the hypothetical situations people have offered. I can assure you, however, that these hypotheticals aren’t ones we had in mind when writing the Terms, and that selling user information for profit or using it to advertise Facebook in some way was never part of our original intent. Assurances aren’t enough, though, and we plan to codify this in our revised Terms through simple language that defines Facebook’s rights much more specifically.

In the meantime, we’ve decided to revert to the old Terms as we work to address this. Mark has explained this in more detail in another blog post (http://blog.facebook.com), and we’ve created a group where people can provide input (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=69048030774). We hope you’ll join this group and post comments. We promise to use these comments to help construct a new Terms of Use that reflects the principles around how people share and control their information, and that’s written clearly in language everyone can understand.

I hope you don’t think your participation in this discussion was a waste of time. Honestly, your questions were very helpful to us in arriving at what we believe is the right decision. Also, I think your questions will continue to be useful as we’re crafting a new Terms.

Again, thanks for the fruitful discussion and a special thanks to Anne Kathrine and Julius for setting up this feedback forum. We hope you’ll all join our “Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” group and continue discussing these issues there.

Barry

Why I Started the Facebook TOS Group

Since I started “People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS)” group on Facebook two days ago I haven’t had time to sit down and write my take on why I started the group in the first place.

I was on the train on my way to work yesterday when I saw this tweet from Valdis Krebs. I hadn’t read anything about any changes to the TOS up until then and was surprised to see they were changed weeks ago and without anyone noticing.
I have had an ambivalent relationship with Facebook since I signed up (it’s complicated), and in the years I have been there they haven’t done much to make me trust their service or their judgments, so I felt I had to speak up this time.
After some initial research (reading the old and new TOS for instance) I set up the group on Facebook about an hour later.

Personally it wasn’t so much about getting Facebook to change their TOS (at least initially). If you read the old TOS you would have known that they always sucked and probably always will. Ideally they would add the two lines they removed again, edit the wording in some places, explain why they felt they needed to change the Terms of Service and how these changes would affect their users.

For me it was much more a matter of Facebook AGAIN not communicating properly with their members. Is it too much to ask for a notification or an email stating that they have changed their TOS?
Maybe also explain in details why they did it and what benefits the changes would have to their members? Does Facebook actually think every member read their blog? I still have friends (on Facebook) who haven’t heard of RSS feeds or still don’t read any blogs.

So much of what has happened the last two days could have been avoided if they had told us directly what they were up to. Facebook has a track record of not informing their users of changes to the service. Makes me wonder if they learned anything at all from the Beacon episode a while back.

What I am hoping to achieve is for Facebook to realize that talking to your members actually is a good thing and maybe even that the members start to become more aware of what, how and with whom they chose to share their content on the web.

It is about time Facebook starts to regain some trust with their users. To the end user it doesn’t matter if Facebook is committed to OpenID or not, what matters is what happens to their pictures, links and everything else they choose to share with their friends.

(Parts of this post was also posted as a comment on ZDNet.)

Spam on Facebook .. Now It Happened To Me As Well

Slowly Facebook IS turning into the new Myspace.
I have been reading several blogposts about people being spammed on Facebook lately, and then today it came around knocking on my door as well.

I received a friends request from a guy calling himself Ryan Attwell .. never heard of him.
I went to check out his profile and noticed that his pictures was part of his public profile. Strange, I thought.

Then I took a closer look at the pictures and found that he had 13 albums of “designer” handbags. Strange again, I thought. This guy does not look like someone who would put his all his designer handbags on display.

But then when I took a closer look at the pictures I noticed that they had an URL written all over them .. which, surprise surprise!, would take me to a site selling fake designer stuff.

I assume that Zuckerberg’s world reign will never happen by the way things are going.
Spam is no longer just a part of the oh-so-lovely 3rd party applications like Funwall and Superwall, but is now also part of the Facebook platform itself.
The fun ended before it really begun..