The Open Road

Given the ungainly hand that has held the rudder of Facebook's privacy policies--most recently with its alleged landgrab on user data--it's welcome to now see Facebook letting its users have considerable say in how the company handles their privacy.

In a bold move, Facebook has "open sourced" its terms of service to allow users to help define them for the social-networking service.

Facebook has proposed a new set of Facebook Principles, as well as a Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, and is inviting users to comment upon them and thereby help to shape them.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the move "fairly unprecedented," and he's right. It's also a welcome departure from the company's ill-fated attempts in the past to foist things like Beacon on the world with little public input.

Given the amount of personal data Facebook holds, it's critical that the processes governing collection and use of that data be somewhat open. A little transparency should go a long way toward making Facebook's privacy policies palatable.

While I don't want to suggest that people can't change (they can), and that mistakes should be forever branded on people like a scarlet "A," I find it disturbing that MySpace, which previously threw 90,000 sex offenders from its site (29,000 in 2007), recently dragged another 6,000 off, according to TechDirt. Facebook, for its part, has dumped 5,500 from its site since May 2008.

Why don't MySpace and Facebook screen for criminal histories before allowing someone on the site, or require some sort of notice of conviction for sex offenses, rather than dusting up after the fact?

Arguably, this would be easier and less painful than state off-line policies related to housing regulations for sex offenders, which The Wall Street Journal chronicled earlier this week. Such policies significantly impact sex offenders' day-to-day lives with tight housing restrictions, among other things.

Tighter controls online would protect children with little increased burden to the sex offender, which strikes me as the ideal balance. Given that most registered sex offenders have little likelihood of recidivism - The Wall Street Journal's report noted that only 90 of the 15,800 registered sex offenders in Georgia are classified as "predators" - I'm all for a low-impact approach that protects children without unduly burdening the lives of the past offenders.

Whatever a state's offline policies on sex offenders may be, pre-filtering applications for accounts with MySpace, Facebook, and other social-networking sites does little to affect the quality of a registered sex offender's life but arguably helps to secure children while using such services. The burden is so low, why haven't we done it yet?

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

In the face of mounting criticism over its change to its terms of service, Facebook has reverted to its original terms of service, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued an apology. It's a nice about-face, but it also misses the point.

The point, as Techdirt intimates, is transparency.

It's hard to think that nobody at Facebook anticipated it and took some proactive steps to address the changes and attempt to allay concerns and preclude the overreaction.

Instead, Zuckerberg responds only after the fuss has been kicked up, and his explanation comes off as damage control, regardless of the motivations behind it or the TOS change...The point isn't that Facebook or any other company shouldn't change their TOS to better reflect their businesses and technology, but that in this day and age, any "minor" change is going to attract lots of scrutiny, and, in all likelihood, will be misunderstood and misinterpreted. This makes the handling of the change much more important than the change itself.

In the Internet Age, companies need to assume that any changes they make to policies, procedures, etc. will become public, and act accordingly. It's no longer a matter of what is legally required to be divulged, but what is socially responsible to divulge.

Transparency, for example, would have served IBM and Novell well in their recent layoffs. Legally, neither was required to publicly announce the layoffs because the number of employees affected wasn't material to the business. But "material" is in the eye of the beholder, and by not talking openly (inside or outside the companies) about the layoffs, both Novell and IBM ended up fanning the flames of rumor. It's unrealistic to expect such events to happen quietly: the Internet is too noisy.

The point is transparency--doing more than the law requires one to do. The alternative is perpetual damage control, which seems to be Facebook's modus operandi. This reminds me of a comment from The Misfit in Flannery O'Connor's Good Country People who, commenting on a self-righteous but flawed woman, says, "She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

I've read reports that only the media and privacy advocates care; that the terms-of-service change didn't matter to the rank-and-file users of Facebook.

This may be true, but that's equally true for just about any important (and many unimportant) issue. We rely on the media and interest groups to ferret out those things that "don't feel quite right" in politics and business.

Companies need to be more transparent. The Internet will force them to be so, but as with Facebook, transparency looks much better when it's voluntary rather than forced.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

While most of the activities on Facebook count as spam or worse ("super poke," anyone?), it's likely that such friending and poking was intended to be private. Recently, however, Facebook changed its terms of service to ensure it has perpetual rights on personal content, including content deleted by its users, as The Consumerist reports:

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....

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

Facebook has always retained the rights to profit from its users' content, but now it retains the right to use old content that its users may have deleted.

Google has had its own problems with user privacy, but this Facebook move calls into question the wisdom of clouds or, rather, storing one's data in others' Web services like Facebook. We need to come up with new licenses or new mandates for open data in the cloud. Facebook shouldn't own our data.

Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.

Facebook on Tuesday announced that it has made the Facebook Markup Language extensible, enabling developers outside of Facebook to create custom tags.

For example, the iLike application developers have provided an iLike tag that shows favorite songs and playlists.

Initially, FBML included only tags that Facebook created. Today, we're excited to announce a new feature called custom tags. With custom tags, any developer can create new FBML tags. Developers can use these tags in their own applications, or they can share their custom tags with the entire Facebook developer community as prebuilt FBML components.

This is a great step forward, but it's also a highly limited one, as ReadWriteWeb points out. To be highly reusable and, hence, more useful, Facebook should consider exposing its markup code to developers so it can be "more easily altered for reuse in different ways by different apps."

Exactly. This is one of the cardinal virtues of open source: code reuse. By allowing development of custom tags, Facebook has taken a step toward openness, but not the one that developers require to be efficient with their code.

Mike Vernal, a member of Facebook's Platform Engineering Team, tells Web 2.0 Journal that "our goal with Platform has been to allow applications anywhere to become more social by leveraging the power of Facebook," but this becomes doubly difficult if the platform is closed.

Sure, some companies can pull off a widely used, mostly closed platform. Microsoft certainly has. But in the age of the Internet, it's much easier to accomplish platform adoption through transparency and open code, making it harder to justify keeping the Facebook platform closed.

Back in 1997 I read Robert Putnam's classic "Bowling Alone" for the first time. In his original thesis, Putnam argues that society has frayed, with people going through the motions of sociability...without actually socializing:

Putnam warns that our stock of social capital - the very fabric of our connections with each other, has plummeted, impoverishing our lives and communities. [He] draws on evidence including nearly 500,000 interviews over the last quarter century to show that we sign fewer petitions, belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less frequently, and even socialize with our families less often. We're even bowling alone. More Americans are bowling than ever before, but they are not bowling in leagues.

Perhaps the Web can help.

All it takes is one look at the blogging phenomenon to see that something is going on. It's not strange that an (apparently) opinionated loudmouth like myself blogs. It is strange to see normally shy or reserved people blogging, Twittering, Facebooking, etc., and I follow a wide range of people that fit this description.

This is one of the most intriguing things about the Web today. It is enabling speech that would normally be muted at best, nonexistent at worst.

Perhaps it's our way of sending a collective "message in a bottle," reminding the world that we're here and that, despite our individual shyness, we want to be heard and connect with others.

For example, my natural disposition is to expect that people have much better things to do than to hang out and/or talk with me, and hence to spend more time than I'd prefer alone. Through Twitter, however, I've come to know friends like @ZUrlocker, @p1lonn, and even my neighbor @bryce much better, and have grown more confident that they actually want to talk to me offline, because of our conversations online. (Guys, don't burst this bubble! :-)

In this way, Facebook and its ilk may actually help us to "bowl together," rather than alone.

It's not about the sheer number of "friends" that one can accumulate online, but rather the basic communication that increasingly takes place online, rather than offline, that makes the Web a unifying force, helping us to find just a few of the "hundred billion castaways looking for a home."

TechCrunch suggests that Facebook's chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly, will shortly announce his candidacy to become California's attorney general in 2010. Given how poorly Facebook has handled privacy, it's difficult to see why California voters should assume Kelly would do better in the higher matters of public office.

Specifically, California's attorney general is charged with the following responsibilities:

The attorney general represents the people of California in civil and criminal matters before trial, appellate and the supreme courts of California and the United States. The attorney general also serves as legal counsel to state officers and, with few exceptions, to state agencies, boards and commissions...

The attorney general also assists district attorneys, local law enforcement, and federal and international criminal justice agencies in the administration of justice...

In addition, the attorney general establishes and operates projects and programs to protect Californians from fraudulent, unfair, and illegal activities that victimize consumers or threaten public safety, and enforces laws that safeguard the environment and natural resources.

Kelly is an experienced and competent attorney, having worked at Baker & Mckenzie and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosatti before joining Facebook. But if he's in any way implicated in Facebook's failed foray into consumer privacy (Beacon, anyone?), and he will be by virtue of throwing his hat in the campaign ring, he needs to answer for his involvement in Facebook's privacy faux-pas before California voters should vote him their trust.

He has answered critics before, and it's possible that being on the front line of electronic privacy issues actually makes him a better candidate than most, even despite missteps. But he first needs to demonstrate that he's done more good than harm relative to protecting people from "fraudulent, unfair, and illegal activities" on Facebook before attempting to protect the broader California public as attorney general.

It's very possible that he can, but I've yet to hear that campaign speech.

O'Reilly Radar's Ben Lorica writes that Facebook has been growing steadily on a global basis, and suggests through the data that Facebook adoption is deep and widespread. Most intriguingly, he finds that in North America working-age users is the fastest growing demographic, while the teen segment is growing much more slowly.

I could have saved him some time. Yesterday I got my haircut, and Valerie, the lady that has cut my hair for the past 20-plus years, started talking to me about how she uses Facebook. Valerie is one of the least technically-adept people I have ever met. If she's using Facebook, the entire planet is.

Take my mother, for instance. I wrote before that my mother has started IM'ing me through Facebook, which was a pretty good indicator of mainstream adoption of the social-networking service. Between Valerie and my angel mother, I have enough proof without reading a shred of statistical evidence that if I wanted to find my fourth-grade crush, I'd almost certainly find her on Facebook. (In fact, I did.).

The big question for Facebook now is how it will monetize that widespread adoption. I still find Facebook tedious and time-wasting. Things like its Facebook Connect service may make Facebook relevant to me without me having to "go to" Facebook.com, and is a step in the right direction.

But Facebook needs to figure out how to make "friends" on Facebook meaningful, both in commercial and other contexts. Once it has done so--once it has effectively mapped my social graph--it wlll have data that it can turn into dollars. At that point, Valerie and Mom will be able to enjoy Facebook while it enjoys dramatic revenue growth, which will be good for all involved.

I'm sick of patent lawsuits.

Earlier this week Spansion filed suit against Samsung for alleged patent violations in the latter's flash chips. On Thursday, Leader Technologies actually issued a press release announcing a lawsuit before it had even bothered to serve notice on Facebook, as Techdirt points out.

Is Leader playing to the judge or to the media?

From the press release:

Leader was founded by Michael McKibben in 1997 and is a pioneer in Web-based collaboration platforms. Leader has filed several patent applications, dating back to 2002, that cover its technology. "We have spent a great amount of time and effort in procuring our intellectual property," says Michael McKibben, founder of Leader and named inventor of Patent No. 7,139,761, "and have taken the steps necessary to protect our proprietary and inventive ideas."

Indeed. You may remember Leader from...well, no, you've never heard of them. At least, I haven't. Leader bills itself as "The Intellectual Capital Company," and lists its products as "Web-based collaboration platforms that merge voice and data." Yet Techdirt parses the patent and describes it as dealing with a "rather obvious process of associating a piece of data with multiple categories." Techdirt suggests that Google would have been a more obvious target.

Regardless, patents have become the province of also-ran companies seeking to milk their "intellectual property," which often is light on both intellect and property.

If you spend more than a millisecond on Leader's Web site, it becomes plausible that Leader is suing Facebook simply to raise money to improve its Soviet-era site. Leader should go away.