Geek Chic

I know Facebook has done some tweaking of their UI lately (most notably to get rid of those spiffy, but apparently very difficult to maintain, rounded corners on the pictures), but they seem to be getting a little careless in terms of what gets out to production.  Working for a large company myself, I know sometimes things can accidentally come out of the oven a little before they’re cooked.  I’m just surprised to see this from Facebook.

Check this out:

1. The logo is blurry.  Maybe they’re trying to reduce the file size?  But man. I think that’s a no-no.  Maybe it’s worth the extra K or two to have the logo be sharp?

2. The borders on all of their photos in the (freaking annoying) Highlights section are totally out of whack:

Come on Facebook! Pull yourself together!  It’s not the weekend yet!  Put down the margarita, re-save your logo, tweak your CSS and THEN you can leave for your rafting trip.  K?

Ok.  I was willing to give it a chance.  But after reading this brief little blurb in Time:

Years from now, when historians reflect on the time we are currently living in, the names Biz Stone and Evan Williams will be referenced side by side with the likes of Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, Philo Farnsworth, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs …

… and now I’m mad.  What a load of crap!

Twitter, as far as I can tell, is totally and completely worthless.  For me.  And for pretty much everyone I’ve talked to in my circle of friends.

It seems to be a revolutionary new way for people I don’t care about to say things I don’t care about and listen to the opinions of still more people I don’t care about.

While the aggregation of all of the posts on Twitter could amount to ‘the next wave of culture’ or ‘news’ you could say that about anything.  I could say that about the blogs I follow via Google Reader.  Or about the items on McDonald’s Value Menu.  Twitter is just data.  Mass amounts of unweighted, subjective data.  And while, yes, it does give you ‘access’ to people you otherwise might not get access to, I’d still say you’re fooling yourself if you think that access is unfiltered.

Do you really think Sarah Palin updates her own Twitter account? Oprah? Arnold Schwarzenegger? Ashton Kutcher? Maybe.  But it could just as easily be their press agents.  Or their interns.

To call it social networking is a lie.  It’s almost entirely anti-social.  You post talking points and assume someone somewhere cares.  The ‘conversation’ barely exists (unlike Facebook, where conversation is the whole point).

So fine.  Let the media people all hang on each others’ words until their heads explode.  Let the teeny-boppers follow Ashton Kuscher.  Let the Republicans follow Sarah Palin.  But count me out.

I don’t see anything Twitter has to offer me that hasn’t already been rolled into Facebook’s latest update, or into something like FriendFeed (that aggregates everything people have already posted).  And I already have a blog, thank you.  I appreciate that I don’t feel lazy or uncreative enough to feel daunted by word count potentially greater than 140 characters.  I like writing.

And the funniest thing is that Twitter’s platform is still completely unstable.  People have complained about their service being jittery nonstop for the past year.  And now, even in light of all of this media attention, they still can’t seem to get it together.

I’m not making any predictions because… sadly… I’ll probably be wrong. But let’s just say I wouldn’t mind if Twitter turns out to be a bad trend (like 80s neon and AOL) that people just try to forget they were excited about after 3 months.

Maybe we can focus our attention on more curious things like the supposedly game-changing Wolfram Alpha, and what on earth that could be.

UPDATE: Oh great. Anyone have any guesses as to why Apple is now, so to speak, sucking Twitter’s dick?  I’m sorry…. a Triumph of Humanity? Come on! A cure for cancer.  That’d be a triumph of humanity. The judges would even accept ‘a cure for Swine Flu.’  But Twitter?  What, did the same guy who wrote the Time article write this one too?  Maybe he gets paid to publish in bulk.

Man, I didn’t like you before, Twitter. But now…

Alright.  Not to speak too soon here, but maybe I was wrong about Facebook yesterday.  And If so, I’ll gladly eat my words.

Read this: Results of the Inaugural Facebook Site Governance Vote

As always, the proof will be in the pudding.  But this sounds to me like FB is going to go with the majority of the 0.32% of active users that voted — and adopt the new user agreement (tossing out the Evil Terms of Service).

While there’s talk in the post about their disappointment at the low turnout, they do acknowledge this is a Faceboook First (as well as an internet first), and are considering lowering the 30% threshold necessary for any future vote to be binding.

First of all, I offer my non-binding, conditional apology to Facebook.  Maybe they’re actually interested in protecting their users’ rights after all.

Second, I still maintain this vote was not nearly as transparent as FB believes it was.  The language was confusing.  The voting period was too short.  And there should’ve been more user notification (eg. ‘Hey! You haven’t voted yet! Only one day left to vote!’) if they wanted this whole process to actually be more democratic.

Still, from the looks of it, at least their heart is in the right place…

I’ve never liked Mark Zuckerberg.  He just seems like kind of a jerk (and, most likely, a thief).

I thought maybe he was turning over a new leaf with this whole rollback of Facebook’s Terms of Service (the ones nobody liked — hereafter called the Evil Terms of Service, or ETOS).

PSYCH!

Turns out Facebook is pretty sneaky after all.

Yes.  They put their new Terms of Service to a vote. And if it passes they will adopt the terms.

BUT:

1) FB will not adopt the terms unless at least 30% of active users participate in the vote (which roughly equates to 60 million users).

2) They gave these active users a week to read 1100 lines of legalese in order to make their ‘informed decision’ about which of the terms sounded more appealing.

3) I (and I’m definitely not alone in this) thought that FB had rolled back their Evil TOS (ETOS) when their users revolted back in February.  But if one compares the two documents being voted on, the terms marked as Current include the ETOS language that got everyone mad:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

Which basically says ‘if you post it, we own it.’

I know a lot of my friends didn’t think to vote because they thought the vote was between the the OLD terms of service (pre-September ’08) and some NEW version — that the offending ETOS version wasn’t even on the table.

It was confusing.  And I think it was deliberately confusing.

Now, I read it.  I read enough of it to know that the ‘current terms’ were the offending ETOS and the ‘new terms’ were less bad, and cast my vote accordingly.  But anyone who believes this is some sort of democratic process, just because Faccebook says it is, might want to read between the lines.  I’m sure Facebook is counting on most of their users either a) voting for the current terms thinking they were the old terms or b) not bothering to vote because they thought the ETOS had been repealed in February.

It is, no doubt, in Facebook’s interest to have their internal ETOS adopted.  If they own all of the content on their service, just think what they could do with it.  The fact that they’re hemorrhaging money wouldn’t seem like quite so much of a problem if they suddenly walked into a worldwide distribution license to ALL OF THE CONTENT on Facebook.

I think Facebook is being manipulative to try to get what they want, cloaking misdirection and miscommunication in user apathy.

But seriously Facebook.  If you want to take away my rights to my own content, just do it — and own up to your users’ wrath.  But don’t try to make it look like I asked you to take away my rights.

For more, check out Chris Dannen’s column at Fast Company

UPDATE: Alright, some of this sounds like conspiracy, but maybe we’ll just call Thursdays ‘Conspiracy Day’ here at Geek Chic and let you decide for yourself:

1) Facebook’s voting closed at noon PDT.  But almost every news source thought it was closing at midnight.  Did the Washington Post not check their facts this morning?  Or did Facebook change the cutoff because the press was starting to pick up the story?

2) Some users claim they didn’t hear there was a vote (to which, we have to say, ignorance is never really a great argument for a re-count, but still…)