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.)

Twitter and Summize

I found this update on the Twitter Status blog this morning interesting:

“The replies tab remains disabled today as we rework some of the queries that were causing problems yesterday. This has also been reflected in the sidebar of the status blog for the web features.
One way you can see replies directed to you is to search on Summize. You can search for “to:username” to see all updates directed at you.”

Twitter now encourages us to use third-party services, for functionalities they cannot deliver themselves anymore.

I know they have partnered with Summize before, for instance during Steve Job’s recent keynote (you can read about it here), to reduce their database load.

But this time they are outsourcing a basic functionality of their own system, which makes me wonder what is left of what Twitter once was?

Just a thought I cannot stop thinking about

It amazes me how busy I am wishing Twitter was back to normal again these days.
It just feels so awkward after so many months of using third party apps, that I had to revert to my browser to tweet again. I even had to go back to m.twitter.com on my iPhone.

By now, realizing that IM and Track will still be offline a while, all I wish for is an API that allows 70 req/hour again. I feel like half-a-person without the tweets trickling into Twitterrific/Growl.

Twitter have one of the most open APIs around, and I also think this was part of their recent headaches. (getting crushed by API calls)
We all gave our Twitter credentials to any third-party app that came along and looked interesting. We had a zillion different Twitter clients, Twitter search, Twitter karma services and we wanted to try it all out.

A while ago I listened to the Gillmor Gang discussing Twitter once again.
We all know Steve’s “obsession” with Track, so part of the conversation somehow got lost, and I haven’t been able to stop reflecting about this part ever since.

Chris Messina brought this up while discussing OAuth:

” So, you don’t actually have specific control to say, “I want to turn off access from Twitterific.”… You know, it’s like Flickr provides a great model of how you can turn on and off access from different services. This is just an example of one of the things that if we had it, I think Twitter would not only be providing greater value, but it would be demonstrating a level of user control over the use of this system that would actually be, I think, leading to greater resilience.”

I don’t know why this model haven’t been discussed.
I can only speak for myself, but in light of the recent problems, I would happily turn off Twitter access to at all the different services and clients I have tried out in the last months. I don’t even know myself anymore how many apps and services receive my tweets.

Implementing a flickr-like model, where you can see which third-party applications you are using and remove the permission for these if necessary, would be fantastic.
As a user it is a great way to control where your credentials go and it wouldn’t hurt Twitter’s API either.