Facebook’s Terms: My Original Complaints Remain

February 18, 2009 by 3 Comments

I see that Zuckerberg and crew did a 180 and reverted the “forever” clause in Facebook’s terms of service. It’s a small step in the right direction, but all of my original objections to Facebook’s terms (the objections that led to me deleting my account) remain. Facebook’s licensing terms are still too broad and claim far more rights than is necessary.

I’ll be speaking tomorrow night at Ignite Portland about social networks, media hosting, and licensing terms.

Filed Under: Rants, Social Media · Tagged With: , , , ,

Intense Debate – Not Quite There Yet

February 17, 2009 by 3 Comments

A couple months ago, I installed Intense Debate, hoping it would provide a nice centralized comment management system that also added some features to my various blogs. Things haven’t gone as well with my Intense Debate experiences as I’d hoped.

Issues on This Blog

Last week, I deactivated the system due to having some problems. I attempted to work with the ID folks via their Get Satisfaction page but they weren’t able to resolve things so I pulled the plugin down so that the experience on my site wouldn’t be impacted. I ran into a few issues:

  • I had more trackback spam than ID could handle. At one point I had 14,000 bits of trackback spam sitting held in the spam queue. With that many items, the ID moderation screen wouldn’t even load… it would always time out.
  • Moderation (even for blogs with very few comments/trackbacks) was slow. Hopefully they can work out the performance issues.
  • I lost a few comments into no-man’s land for several hours. People left a couple comments, I approved them, but the comments didn’t appear on the site (or in the moderation list) for several hours. For some reason, the temporarily-lost comments did appear in the “recent comments” sidebar widget.

Issues on the OurPDX Group Blog

I encouraged Betsy to install Intense Debate when updating the OurPDX website last week, but after 24 hours on the site we pulled the plug. ID just isn’t ready for a large group blog for a couple reasons:

  • The only way to allow authors to moderate comments on their posts was to make them full admins within Intense Debate. This isn’t realistic since most authors don’t need (and shouldn’t have) full administrative rights.
  • With only one administrator, that person had to approve every single comment across all posts (instead of each author being able to moderate his/her own).
  • Likely a related issue, but authors no longer received comment notifications for their posts. Since OurPDX asks that authors participate in discussions on their posts, not having notifications is a big inconvenience.

Overall the concept is great and it works fairly well for smaller sites… but there are definitely some performance issues and some issues for multi-author blogs that need to be addressed before I’d give the green light for Intense Debate everywhere.

Filed Under: Blogging, Social Media · Tagged With: , , ,

Facebook Terms of Service Change: Content is now Licensed Forever

February 9, 2009 by 14 Comments

A few weeks ago I posted about deleting my Facebook account due to their terms of service being an overly broad rights grab for any content posted on the site.

There was a lively discussion with over 30 comments left on the post. Commenter Matt Behrens noted that Facebook’s terms indicated that a user could remove his or her content and that Facebook’s license would expire at that time.

Not anymore.

While researching for my presentation, I discovered that Facebook updated their terms of use on February 4th. The section about a user being able to revoke the content license by removing the content from Facebook is now gone. There is no verbiage that indicates a user may remove Facebook’s license. Facebook now claims a perpetual license to any content posted on their service, with no way for a user to terminate that license.

Filed Under: Social Media, Technology · Tagged With: , , ,

Don’t Move Important Buttons: Twhirl’s Bad Update

February 9, 2009 by Leave a Comment

I just updated to version 0.9 of Twhirl, my Twitter client of choice. The new version has some great new features including saved searches. Unfortunately there’s a small button change with annoying implications.

Twhirl Trash Button Moved

In previous versions, the “trash” button was on the far right (green circle). My normal method was to clear the tweets using this icon as I read, so that if I wanted to catch up on what I missed I’d know how far back to go. With the new version, the trash icon was moved to the left (red circle). On the right? The refresh button. Now, instead of trashing, my habitual mouse move to that location does a refresh which a) doesn’t clear the window and b) makes another hit to Twitter’s limited API.

I’m cranky. I’m using up API calls and momentarily wondering why hitting the button (which has always been in the same place) isn’t clearing the window. How is this an upgrade?

Filed Under: Rants, Social Media, Software Dev · Tagged With: , , , ,
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