Two Slashes

Excuses, excuses.  I was in the middle of writing this post when I was commissioned to sit on the phone keeping people awake on their train ride home, causing me to seek refuge in silence away from a computer.

With a little nudging from Nick S., who’s busy at work on The Next Big Thing™, I ended up keeping tabs on the press conference (call) Facebook held earlier today regarding their ever-changing service agreement.  If anything, it gave me a better idea of just how generally clueless some of the people running the scenes (and even some who are not) are.  Of course, this all comes after a giant uproar over Facebook changing their terms of service such that it read that Facebook now owned any user-submitted content.  Permanently.

While I don’t have a personal issue with Facebook utilizing the content I have uploaded to the service (namely, the same image of myself you can find on this site or any other service I use), I have several friends with interesting and original content who might be offed by just how many rights the social networking site was granting itself with the new policy (in theory).  I know that they wouldn’t like having their content ripped off, and I’m sure most of the people reading this would have similar issues.

I find it funny that people are willing to put up with all of these antics, though.  I guess I shouldn’t be all that surprised given that people deal with the Fail Whale, tolerated MySpace’s surefire “Oops, we had an error!” pages, and can generally use the Internet without the requirement of a computing license, but it still amazes me that people can be so blatantly ignorant when it comes to the things they share with other people and the methodologies they employ in doing so.  It’s because of stunts like these (alright, that’s the number two reason behind the fact that the services are designed that for reason) that I post pictures to Picasa, videos to Vimeo, and generally harbor my content all over at sites that put the creator’s rights before their own.  Besides, it’s not a wise idea to put all your eggs in one basket.

Facebook seems to be trying to take  recent events into consideration, as their latest blog post states that they’re going to try a more democratic system for some of the policy changes they enact across the site, in particular anything that might cause controversy.  Nick and I both came to the immediate conclusion that this may not be the best policy, as you’re asking the same people who have no common sense to vote one way or another.  It’s like giving a six-year-old a Presidential ballot (the fact that this is unlikely notwithstanding) – they’re ill-informed and incapable of making a sensical decision based on knowledge or reasoning, so their vote could more or less be attributed to pseudo-randomness.  Unfortunately, it’s a first-hand chance to fight for proper rights provided by few other platforms.

Like I said already, the conference didn’t exactly show a stroke of genius among either the reporters asking questions or the people in charge over at Facebook.  As an excellent example (and to end the post), I leave you with this short, unrelated question and the nonsensical answer provided straight from Facebook’s founder.  What a bright bunch.

Stacy Kramer (Paid Content): How important is this financially?
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook): This is all about trusting our users. And it will result in the best outcome: the best community.