Wake Up to How You Share on the Web | chrisbrogan.com
What Facebook is saying, and they have to, is that they have to own your stuff, because if Facebook Connect and other services are going to make your data ubiquitous and shared and spread all around like peanut butter, then they have to have the rights to republish and distribute it. (I might have this a bit wrong. I’m willing to be a bit wrong.)
via Wake Up to How You Share on the Web | chrisbrogan.com.
Here’s one of those places where language can trip you up, and which may be part of the problem with the Facebook TOS.
Facebook doesn’t need to own your content. It may need to retain the rights to keep a copy of it for certain purposes — but ownership implies a much different set of requirements.
“ownership” implies they control future use of the item, that they are now “in charge”. In reality, what Facebook needs to be working towards is a non-exclusive usage license. There’s a huge gulf between OWN (“all rights”) and a non-exclusive license. What Facebook needs to be aiming for is the recognition that once you share something, it’s practically impossible to unshare it, so they need to maintain rights to maintain those shared versions of things in perpetuity. But they can still make explicit that once you delete “the original” their right to create new shared copies ends. They should commit that when you chose to stop sharing, they’ll stop allowing new copies or instances to be created.Technically could be a bit interesting, but do-able.
The other aspect, the one that seems to have is their use of things for marketing. At one level, this is understandable – if only because when you do screen shots, god knows what content is going to be in there, and faking all of the content looks bad. But – there needs to be real clarity of how and in what forms this will and won’t be used. The lawyer-friendly “forever and however we feel lik eusing it, including selling CD’s of stock photography to chinese brothels” doesn’t work, even if it allows lawyers to sleep well at night. Lawyers covering all possible bases shouldn’t be the primary goal of the TOS, however, right?
Facebook | Update on Terms
A couple of weeks ago, we revised our terms of use hoping to clarify some parts for our users. Over the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information. Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.
Many of us at Facebook spent most of today discussing how best to move forward. One approach would have been to quickly amend the new terms with new language to clarify our positions further. Another approach was simply to revert to our old terms while we begin working on our next version. As we thought through this, we reached out to respected organizations to get their input.
via Facebook | Update on Terms.
It’s good to see Facebook commiting to try to do the right thing here. It’s too bad they had to get raked across the coals in public first. While a lot of the bloggers and pundits love to declare evil first and loudly, it seemed to me that there was a lot of noisy over-reaction going on; but then, that’s unprecedented here in the online world, right? It’s not news unless we can post an unflattering photo and declare our superiority, after all. Preferably with a snarky meow.
To me, the more interesting question is how Facebook got here and how they could have avoided it.
The first problem, and its a big one, is that the TOS was updated without notification of the users. Notice that Apple’s itunes always puts up a dialog announcing a TOS change and making you pretend you read it and click the “I accept” when they change it? Legally, you can write a TOS that allows you to change it and users are expected to somehow know this has happened. Legally, users have the right to hate your guts when you do it. Disclosure is a big plus here; when it changes, announce it and explain it. that’s one reason why a blog exists, right?
Zuckerberg did explain it — after the fact, once the controversy started. By the time he did, it was too late. People were already ripping Facebook. By the time Facebook engaged the community, it was too late. (and why, for a site that’s basic function is enabling communication and community, is Facebook so quiet and distant from its community? Just asking. it’s not unique in this, either).
But the second problem here isn’t the late engagement. It’s that what Zuckerberg said the intent was, and what the TOS said, were two very different beasts. And here’s the big problem, and one where Facebook made the mistake so many companies make; they allowed the lawyers to dictate corporate policy and not define it.
Imagine if Zuckerberg had taken his blog postings and given it to the lawyers when the TOS rewrite project started. Imagine if every time a draft of the TOS came back, he said “that is not what our intentions are” and rejected it. Imagine…
I’ve been in far too many meetings with lawyers over things like this, and far too often, everyone defers to the lawyers. Ultimately, the lawyers get to write legalese in ways the lawyers are comfortable with that managers can live with, rather than pushing the lawyers to come up with language that the managers are comfortable with that the lawyers can live with.
So you end up with TOS’s that require a college degree to decode, that basically take away everything from the end user rather than strike a balance with the user, one that makes the lawyer comfortable.
Problem is, the more comfortable your lawyer is, the more uncomfortable your user will be. And if you’re the manager driving the TOS wording, your job is to make sure the TOS both reflects the company’s needs and goals and intentions, but also allows the user to be comfortable uing the site. As the manager in charge, your lawyer is your friend and looking out for the company’s best interest — but it’s critical that the lawyer be tasked to come up with language that fits the company’s needs and which is going be acceptable to users.
That’s a rare accomplishment these days. But it can be done by setting the tone early (as Zuckerberg did – too late!) and then pushing the lawyer to find a way to enable that in the legalese. You don’t do that by deferring to the lawyer; in this case, the managers in charge have to champion for the users. Better yet, has anyone ever bothered to “beta test” a TOS, or even focus group it? nope. It’s a one-sided discussion, and there’s no feedback until it goes final and people get pissed. And at that point, it’s too late.
So if you don’t want to be the next Facebook, or if Facebook doesn’t want to end up doing this again, a few suggestions:
- See the blog entry Zuckerberg wrote? That needed to be written before the first meeting and handed to everyone involved and the lawyers tasked with implementing that philosophy into the TOS
- Every time a draft comes back and it doesn’t match the intetions in that opening memo, send it back.
- NDA a few key users, especally people critical of your policies. Get their feedback. Listen to it. Find the compromise position.
- Don’t release it until you’re happy with it. the lawyer doesn’t have to be happy with it. I’d argue that the happier the lawyer is with it, the more work you have in balancing the TOS to handle the user’s needs as well. Your lawyer has to be willing to LIVE with it, not like it.
- When you release it, announce it; blog what you’re doing, and why. document and explain the changes. Transparency rules.
- And don’t be afraid to take the wider feedback and tweak it again.
And remember, as we move more and more into shared content creation, social networking, people stuffing things on sites they don’t own and run, these issues are going to become more widespread, more complex, and less clear. So unilateral “lawyer first, end-user never” TOS language is going to increasingly create friction points, and occasionally turn into full-scale firefights. So either recognize this up front and commit to avoid it, or risk being the next to face the wrath of pissed off users.
In a shared reality, dictating terms is becoming increasingly impractical. Lawyers love to dictate. The manager of the project’s job is to both champion the users and keep the lawyer focused on doing what’s best for everyone. the lawyer is there to do the company’s bidding on defining the terms — not dictate them. Too many companies are unwilling to make the laywer do that.
In the social world, that’s going to increasingly become a requirement. Embrace it and it can become a competitive advantage — think about it; right now, there are a bunch of people looking for alternatives to Facebook over this. Facebook now has to convince them that alternative IS Facebook. And competitors can use their TOS right now to compete with Facebook, if they do it right.
Is that an opportnity you want to give to your competitors?
Fighting sockpuppet reviews on the App Store
App Store reviews have been controversial from the beginning — while they can be helpful for buyers, you often have no idea just who’s leaving comments or what their real agenda is. Njection, the makers of Nmobile (which we played with a while ago) are having a huge problem with what they’re calling “sockpuppet” reviews on the App Store.
Someone (they believe this person is in cahoots with their competitor) is posting bad reviews on their app and trying to trash them and their product elsewhere (including in a comment here on TUAW). And unfortunately, as they say, they don’t really have much recourse against this behavior — they’ve appealed to Apple, who’ve replied that they’ll leave comments up, unless they’re offensive or extremely false. Apple’s own guidelines for reviewing apps asks that the reviewers deal with apps on their own merit rather than attacking competitors, but that seems to be more of a recommendation than a firm rule.
Njection says the comments have kept consumers from trying out their apps, though it seems difficult to actually track how many people haven’t tried your app (and why). It’ll be interesting to see if Apple makes other changes to the review system if this sort of thing rears its ugly head more often. At this point, it seems devs just have to deal with it by doing damage control when necessary and making their app good enough that “sockpuppeting” doesn’t strongly affect public opinion.
via Fighting sockpuppet reviews on the App Store – The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).
I guess I’m not convinced. Looking at the app in question, there are a total of twelve reviews, seven of them 4 or 5 stars, only 3 gave it one star. Since others have the ability to rate the usefulness of each review, there’s some feedback going on with the reviews themselves, and so it’s not until the ninth review that you get a rating of less than 3 stars when sorted by “most helpful”. that seems like some fairly positive reviews overall.
Given that Apple only allows one review per store account and that account has to have bought the product, it’s rather hard for me to see a significantly organized turfing attack here. I don’t know which is reality, but my gut feel is that the turfing worries are overblown.
You could also think maybe it’s a developer looking for a way to explain away bad reviews. And it presumes that the developer didn’t have their friends all log in and report the five star reviews, too. Turfing can go both ways, of course. Not that we’d ever do that — and not that I’m implying the developer did. Definitely saying they shouldn’t, FWIW.
Having said that — there are some ways to limit the impact of turfing if it exists.
First: free limited versions. If users are hesitant to pay for the App because of some bad reviews, then give them a way to trial the app before paying. That’s been very successful with me trying out various free versions of apps on the store and then buying the full version. there’s really little reason to NOT do this, and yes, Apple really needs to formalize support for this in the store in some way, but until then, Lite versions rock, and remove the worry of buyer remorse.
Second: Yelp has this same problem. One way its gets solved is via high numbers of reviews. The larger the set of comments on something, the less impact any individual or turfing campaign can have. So a simple way for developers to limit the impact of turfing attacks is to encourage the users to submit their own reviews. Something as simple, perhaps, as when they fire up the app after having used the app for some period of time, putting up an alert encouraging them to review the app and explain how. add in a couple of buttons (“take me there”, “not yet”, “stop annoying me”), and make it as easy as possible for them to put the review in.
If you think about it, if your users are happy with you, a percentage of them will go and say so. And that stream of reviews will blow out any impact of a turfing attack.Of course, if the users aren’t thrilled, you might get buried, but you wrote a great app, right? aren’t afraid of some criticism, right?
There are other things you can do — a lot of it boils down to giving users information about the person writing the review so they can evaluate the reviewer and decide how much to trust them — and I went into some details on my ideas on that a couple of months ago. Most of that would be relevant to upgrading the App Store reviewing system. Honestly, though, I don’t think it’s all that bad these days. Could be better, but the big missing piece is the ability to do free demos. I expect Apple to solve that at some point, but developers can do something about it on their own.
I can’t think of an app I’ve used that suggested I go to the store and review it, though. Why the heck not? Free advertising, folks. Do it in a tactful manner, and I’ll bet a good chunk of the users will cooperate. Seems to me the BEST advertisement for an app isn’t a five star rating, but that 500 or 1000 users reviewed and recommended it. That’s what you want to aim for.
Does Google Friend Connect have a point?
Yet – and I’m sorry if I seem ignorant, but I really do want to know – I still ask: What’s the point of it? Why would I want to be part of Google Friend connect on someone’s blog, or someone join it on my blog? Once we all do that, then what?
via Does Google Friend Connect have a point? — NevilleHobson.com.
I’m glad it’s not just me. When I set up the new blog, I installed both Google Connect and MyBloglog widgets, mostly to experiment with them and see hwo they work and what people use them for.
As far as I can tell, the primary purpose of these things is to give you a way to show the universe just how popular you are. Which, if you’re into counting numbers and telling people how popular you are can be a really useful thing. Probably also useful if you’re trying to convince folks you’re an A-lister.
But honestly, that’s not me, so last night, as I was tweaking the sidebar and navigation based on watching the first couple of weeks of use of chuqui.com, I pulled both of them. I considered putting them on the About page for a while, but to be honest, I just couldn’t see any real advantage to me to having them.
Your mileage may well vary. But since I’m more interested in whether people find my writing interesting and not crowing about how many people “connect” to me, I don’t see a lot of use to either setup — for now. I am, however, going to see how Google enhances it down the road, because there’s still a need for a good, centralized common profile technology. This, however, isn’t it yet.
(MyBlogLog? well, it’s pretty much what it was when Yahoo! bought it. I’m not sure what plans, if any, Yahoo! has for it — and what I’m looking for these things to be seems to be something Yahoo! is trying to build into it’s account profiling and email platform. We’ll see. But the real story here, like Feedburner, is that being bought may pay off the founders and VCers, but it’s also almost a guarantee that a site will grind to a halt, because, of course, the first priority after being bought is revamping everything to fit the new corporate standards and migrate to their data center, technologies and servers. And that, the way the internet goes, is almost a guarantee to being irrelevant once you surface and try to figure out how to innovate the technology again…)
40 of the Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them
Smart brands use Twitter in meaningful ways, and most of them use their brand name as a way to make sure customers can find and recognize them. This piece, and the knowledge I learned from the incessant hours invested, demonstrate why brands do belong on Twitter. No other medium gets you inside a business or brand quiet like Twitter.
via 40 of the Best Twitter Brands and the People Behind Them.
I’ve been having this discussion on and off with some folks over the last week or so as we try to figure out things like how Twitter fits into a larger strategy with blogs, facebook, friendfeed, etc (the list can go on forever…).
To me, Twitter is conversation; it’s effectively the latest reinvention of instant messaging. It’s also transient; it’s the literal lifesteram that you dip into when you can, and which flows past when you don’t — and it shouldn’t be something you need to or want to save for later or archive for the future. That’s just not what it’s about, or should be.
The key word, though, is conversation. If all a company or a person plans to do is dump pointers to blog entries in it, then don’t bother; it’s not just an alternative to RSS. When I find someone doing that in the list of people I follow, I drop them. Ditto, if someone comments at you, you should be chatting back. Companies that see twitter as just another one-way communications feed are going to lose out and be disappointed.
And as we were talking about this, I had this really strange thought: beating on Apple for not blogging, for not twittering, for overtly refusing to get into conversation with its customers in any real way isn’t a new concept, by any means, and people know my view of that from way back.
But — I realized yesterday that so many “mainstream” companies have — Ford and GM, the NHL, Burger King, Pepsi — these companies have all stepped into this new conversations marketing world and are exploring how to use it to connect to customers and grow their business.
And as of this week, so has the White House and the President of the United States.
And where’s Apple? Still basically marketing the way they did a decade ago, hiding behind the firewall and pushing a one-way conversation. When do we say that companies aren’t just not playing “bleeding edge” about this stuff, but starting to fall behind the power curve completely?
This is going to sound funny, but while I’ve been on the Internet since, well, we used banging rocks together to make modem sounds — and yet I remember the day when I realized that the internet had “made it” and was now part of larger society. I was working in my garden turning soil and adding steer manure in large quanties to what was going to be a vegetable garden. and I realized, all of a sudden, that the bag a FREAKING URL TO A WEB PAGE on a bag of cow crap.
Ford blogs. GM blogs. The president of the united states has reached out and started that conversation with the people.
So where’s Apple? And when does it’s refusal to join this conversation stop being amusing and start impacting business?
(actually, that’s a big part of the answer: as long as Apple can look at its business and say “what’s broken?” the motivation to make significant changes is limited. It doesn’t have to. Nor can you really blame it, because it’s working. But when that changes? If you don’t invest in these things now, they won’t be there when you need them. That was a lesson Apple should have learned from the MobileMe rollout disaster. Businesses fighting to improve or fix themselves are more wiling to take risks and do new things — but all companies need to make these strategic investments).
I can’t see how any company can look at what’s happened this week with whitehouse.gov and Obama’s embrace of the online communications environment and NOT have to have a long discussion with itself about whether it can afford to NOT be involved in these conversations any more. It is going to be increasingly a competitive disadavantage to companies that don’t.
Open Source Communities – Push cx
Open source projects should be judged as much by their community as by their technological achievements. The code tells you what it’s good for, but the community tells you what its future is.
Communities need to be active to continue improving the project, deal with bugs and changes to their ecosystem. If no one is interested enough to talk about the project, none of that will happen. Newcomers need to meet experienced users to be sold on why to use the software, to get help as they learn their way around, to maybe be drawn into contributing to the project itself.
I nice view of the dynamics of communities by Peter Harkins. One of the aspects of this, I think, is that from the communities I’ve been involved in over the years, the smaller the set of people actively involved in the decision process, design and implementation, the more sensitive that project is to fading or falling apart if the life or motivation of a key member changes. For that reason alone, communities really need to foster new members into the project and ways to recognize and enable the most effective and capable into the “inner circle” where they’re ready and able to step up and move a project forward. If you don’t do this kind of “succesion planning” from the start, when you need it, it won’t be there.
Geeks tend to think you don’t need marketing, but they’re wrong. Marketing, even of an open source project, is key to enable adoption and convince people to evaluate it and join the project. projects really should consider community growth as a key metric in he success of a community, and communities really need to look at outreach, evangelism, and recruitment to be tasked out the same way bugs, features and documentation are, and those members should be part of the “core team” whether or not they actually code.
One reason it looks to me that Rails has taken off faster than django is simple: the rails guys did a lot of talking and promoting and evangelizing of rails, where the django folks have been quieter and less self-promoting of themselves and the technology.
A technology nobody knowss about may be great, but it won’t change the world.
The biggest problem with Web 2.0 today is….
What’s wrong with this picture?:
As I clean up loose ends getting ready to launch the new chuqui.com, I’m finding little details all over the place that need fixing — like my yahoo/mybloglog profile showing me working at a place I left 18 months ago. oops
And one of the great unsolved problems of the web 2.0 space: everyone wants me to create my profile on their service (because, of course, that information has value).
Now, what’s best for me, the individual, is to have some way to create this information once, maintain it in a single place, and then distribute it out to everyone to use as a shared resource.
Now, the hassle is that every service will be really happy to do that, as long as the single place is their place, and all of the other services pull from them.
So we still have this tower of babel as far as user profiles.
Who’s going to bell this particular cat? anyone?
What’s wrong with this picture?
As I clean up loose ends getting ready to launch the new chuqui.com, I’m finding little details all over the place that need fixing — like my yahoo/mybloglog profile showing me working at a place I left 18 months ago. oops.
And I went to update the picture on the profile. Notice the problem? No?
Where’s the flickr integration? I can’t simply take a photo out of my flickr stream for this?
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