About Face: Facebook Terms of Service Reversal Has Irreversible Consequences

Some people attribute it to Twitter. Others point to blogs and email campaigns. Regardless, the speed with which Facebook responded to a ferocious backlash over changes it made to its Terms of Service agreement was remarkable. Not only for the speed of its crisis management in the wake of the outcry and proposed boycotts, but for what likely marks a significant turning point in the way content, copyright and ownership are perceived in general.

The facts are simple. About three weeks ago, Facebook made a modification to its Terms of Service, without much, if any, communication as to the changes. The equivalent of releasing a press statement on a Friday afternoon so as to avoid above-the-fold coverage the following morning. In response to a reader tip, a February 15, 2009 article by Chris Walters in Consumerist titled “Facebook's New Terms Of Service: "We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever," spread like wildfire.

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual,
non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to
sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform
or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt,
adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User
Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the
promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to
Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your
name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising,
each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the
promotion thereof.

For even the layperson, the scope and breadth of the new, somewhat abstruse terms were ridiculous. The terms were fraught with legal landmines, and sweeping enough in scope and breadth to probably render half of them invalid anyway.

If Facebook owns all our content, some clucked and twittered and pinged and bonged, even after we have terminated our accounts, does this mean they are liable for any of the illegal content we upload? Not quite.
Under the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996, which most media outlets reported as having been struck down in the wake of a couple of Supreme Court decisions challenging specific provisions of the legislation, Service Providers are not liable for third party content. (Disclosure: I was personally involved in both challenges heard by the Supreme Court –filing an amicus brief in the first, Reno v. ACLU, and as the plaintiff in the second, ApolloMedia v. Reno).

Of course if Facebook was to exercise some of the rights they were laying claim to in the new terms, such as the license to “reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt” or “create derivative work” from, they would cease to be merely Service Providers, or, Information Exchange Providers, (as CEO Mark Zuckerberg positioned Facebook in his unconvincing justification in the wake of the backlash), but Content Providers, for whom a whole different set of rules applies.

A few remarkable things happened. In an age where Privacy and Terms of Service are all but ignored, the fact that so many people were paying attention was astounding. But more interesting was that the outcry seemed to include many people who are ensconced in a culture where expectations around ownership of intellectual property are that it should be free.

Musicians, artists and filmmakers have been forced to rethink ownership of the fruit of their creations, where their music is given away by attaching it to a product. Not that long ago, top musicians would never dream of allowing their music to be used in commercials, lest they be accused of selling out. Only now do we see Ford using David Bowie’s 1969 “Space Oddity” to hawk the Lincoln MKS (despite the bizarre inappropriateness). Madonna, on the other hand, used “Hung Up” to sell Motorola before the song from her Confessions album was even released for the sake of the music.

Facebook's seizing control and ownership over the content belonging to the average user highlights an evolving and fundamental paradigm shift in how people view intellectual property. As the distinctions between user generated content and “editorialized” content become blurrier by the minute, so do the lines between treatment of customers as active stakeholders, as opposed to simply passive consumers.
This bodes well for creators of content, who are looking for ways to monetize the fruits of their labor, as consumers become less likely to be offended by the notion of paying for premium content – based solely on the quality of the content and reputation of its creators.

It may turn out that Facebook, in spite of its about face, inadvertently ushered in the turning of an inevitable tide.

a good user experience is a verified facebook app.

Kinda cool that the three requirements to get an app verified as part of facebook's new program are the fundamental three tenets of a good user experience. If this is what it takes to drive the enforcement of strong experience design, so be it.

For reference, the three requirements include:

Secure: Protects user data and honors privacy choices for everyone across the social graph. Facebook users are deliberate and specific about which data they choose to share, how they share it, and with whom. All applications must respect users’ choices and the choices of their friends by only accessing, using and sharing data users have explicitly allowed. Users put their trust in Facebook, our Platform and your applications. This trust enables us to provide with social information for your applications. So it is up to all of us to earn and maintain user trust.

Respectful: Values user attention and honors their intentions in communications and actions. Users trust that when they use your application, you will represent their intent and best interests, especially the messages you send about them or on their behalf. The more control you give them over how you represent them, the more likely they are to trust your application and want to use it more. Make sure to also value users’ time by employing proper communication channels and neither spamming users, nor encouraging them to become spammers.

Transparent: Explains how features will work and how they won’t work, especially in triggering user-to-user communications. Nothing is more frustrating than to click a button expecting one thing to happen and having something entirely different and confusing happen instead. Even worse is sending communications to a user’s friends that the user did not intend or want to send. This can undermine a user’s personal relationships and deters users from freely communicating on Facebook and through applications. The best applications are clear about their features and don’t try to deceive users.

So, to the latter point, i guess transparency is the new user experience. Personally i think the ultimate manifestation of transparency will be Obama's change.gov, but this is a good start.

user generated content management systems

when i started this blog over a year ago, shall we say i digressed, it was with intent to cover the uncovered domains of social media such as user generated content management systems and my severe underwhelm at industry tools that allowed for the successful management of UGC on media and business sites.


Of course most white label apps have an administrative interface, some more valuable than others, that allow an ‘admin’ to delete content and block users, but that’s more or less where the buck stops. Fact is that the true users of these systems are more than mere admins, they are typically highly curious and engaged editorial teams ( either newsroom and producers on the media side, and content editors and marketing professionals on the business side) that are looking for tools that give them visibility into the content that is generated by readers on their site. They need tools the likes of heatmaps that point to where the most topical debates are occurring on the site, visibility into readers that have the highest amount of ‘recommends’ and blog posts or articles that have gained the most comments. Their jobs are to drive traffic to their site and are in need of tools that allow them to better find, discover, feature, curate and deliver content created by users back to relevant and contextual locations on their site.

Today I am at Pluck’s annual customer conference, Socialize,(i was on a panel discussing this very issue) there is no doubt greater demand from media publications in need of better tools, I am encouraged by partnerships with CMS providers like Interwoven and third party UGC providers. While my hopeful ideal would be a single interface from which to manage all content on a brand site(both editorial and UGC) and with log in and content delineated specific to user role, the next best thing is a single interface from which to manage all UGC no matter the vendor or source. Definitely time for business to start driving requirements and insist that all UGC funnel this route.

With industry trends predicting 25% of all content will be UGC by 2015 (that mix is closer to 90/10 on media sites today), and business no doubt on a continuing path to manage 2 sources/streams of content, i look forward to learning more about industry progress and trends in building better UGCMS tools.

Any pointers?

This is not a blog.

And this is decidedly NOT a blog post.

I have been so unfond of the term Blog for so long now that i have avoided use of this format entirely until now. Well, until I decided to call it something different, in this case a Voice. My Voice.

Since I've just arrived in London I'm feeling particularly sensitive to the possible mortification of the Brits at the term Blog and Blogroll, sounding gushingly familiar to Bog and Bogroll (of toilet and toiletpaper fame). I am actually at Oxford University today and attended a Mobile Social Networking Conference (with an excellent and innovative presentation by Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore)

Back to the bastardization of blogs though since i seem to be on that topic. Having recently launched comments on Articles with SFGate, the home of the San Francisco Chronicle online, I wonder how journalists will feel that they are now bloggers (after all, if you enable an article with comments is it not a blog?), or similarly how bloggers, who appear to think of their "blogosphere" as a place rather than a publishing format, will react to the demise of this fabrication over time.

A new section on a social network I recently launched on Olivia.com, a social network for Lesbians, will profile a section called Voices in its next iteration where users can publish just that - their Voices. In a meeting with the team I expressed my disdain for having a navigation header called Blogs since it represents a technology and not an expression. Together with Sabrina Riddle and UI designer Lea Winters, we decided on Voices as the section header. So from now on the messaging will be Create Your Voice. Featured Voice, etc. We love it. Hope the users do too. Will link to it here when it goes live.

Most importantly, hope you enjoy my voice here on tracecohen.com