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terms-of-service posts

Filed under: News, Social Software, web 2.0

Facebook Terms of Service voting ends, crowdsourced terms win

As you may have noticed if you've logged into Facebook over the past month or so, the social network site held a vote to democratically decide on its new terms of service, after a widely-reported backlash against changes to the way the site deals with ownership of users' content. Today, the results are in, and despite a low turnout, it looks like Facebook is going with the winning set of terms, the new Facebook Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.

Of the roughly 600,000 users who voted, three quarters supported the new document over Facebook's existing TOS. Part of the reason the new document was so popular is that it included input from the Facebook user community, collected via Facebook itself. That input said that users mainly care about three things: limits to Facebook's use of their content, the option to opt-in to any changes in terms, and clear rules without legal jargon. The Principles tried to offer all three, which probably accounts for their success in the vote.

With only a small percentage of Facebook's 200 million users weighing in, the company will try to amend the rules to make the vote official, so the new terms should be in place soon.

Filed under: News, Social Software, web 2.0

Facebook adopts new principles, asks for user feedback


After a move to draconian terms of service that included taking ownership of practically all user content, Facebook caught such a big backlash from users that it had to roll back to the old terms. Now Mark Zuckerberg has posted on the Facebook blog with some info about how Facebook will handle its terms of use going forward. The plan is to proceed according to some new "principles" and solicit user feedback about changes.

So, what are these principles?

Well, in spite of the misstep toward owning user data, one of Facebook's new principles is that users own their own content. The others are equality (same terms for every user), free flow of information, freedom to share, no more arbitrary removal of accounts, and transparency about future plans and changes.

Comments are open now on these proposed principles, and on the corresponding new "rights and responsibiities" document.

Filed under: Design, Fun, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Web services, Commercial, Beta

ComicBrush lets you create your own comics, or does it?

ComicBrushComicBrush is a new online tool intended to allow regular people like you and me to create cartoons quickly and easily, even if we don't have any artistic talent. So far, so good, seems like a great premise. I was excited to give it a try. Excited, that is, until I found that I needed to create an account just to kick the tires.

Creating an account isn't that big of a deal, I suppose, but these days that's a pretty big commitment for something that is likely to be just a momentary curiosity online. Personally, a tool needs to be pretty compelling before I'm willing to take the time to register and give up personal information, even if it is only my email address, location, time zone and birth date.

But the registration process goes off the rails with the license that you must read and agree to. It turns out that ComicBrush is not free (though it's not made clear on the homepage), but that you must purchase Points that can then be used to acquire Assets on ComicBrush. Assets are essentially graphics that you can use in your comics. Okay, fine, what's the big deal, you ask? Well, in the Terms of Service that you have to agree to, there are not one, but two check boxes to agree to. The first one is the complete contents of the TOS, and the second one pulls out the most important element from the TOS (since ComicBrush knows that most of us don't bother to actually read big long legal documents on signup pages).

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The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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