Nope. I'm not dead, nor did I abandon this blog just yet.
I did, however, become a father a few weeks ago, hence the quiet period.
Back to work next week, and back to blogging next week.
In an intrestingly titled article on Advertising Age, "Twitter: A Vampire That Can Legally Suck the Life out of You", Simon Dumenco reigns down on Twitter's new terms of service. Following the fiasco of the Facebook TOS change just a little over six months ago, Simon sees similarities between the terms and cries wolf.
Reading his article, I remembered a conversation with a corporate lawyer a while back regarding different TOS's for websites. He stated that:
"You don't need a good terms of service that's full of legalese for the good days. For those days, a simple set of bullet points will do. But when the bad day comes, you're going to be happy if your TOS is full of legalese and less full of loopholes."
And looking this from Twitter's point of view, this seems to be exactly what they're doing. One of the point's that has been causing a stir, is the excerpt of the TOS that defines ownership and distribution of the tweets:
"By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, nonexclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed)."
Yes, it does give Twitter basically the right to do anything with your tweets. But given the nature of Twitter, it might be even a good thing. A big part of Twitter is it's API that allows developers to extend Twitter, even create new services based on it. Given that, how could we expect a TOS that says "we won't touch your tweets, we'll just display them on our website"? Distributing, aggregating, allowing access to the tweets. It's a complex equation that Twitter needs to balance legally as well as technically.
Some still cry out and claim that Twitter has too many rights over the content. As there are similarities between the new Twitter TOS and Facebook's infamous we-own-it-all TOS, why isn't Twitter all that evil? Simple: the content produced to the services is vastly different.
Of course never-ending arguments could be had over the value of a 140-character tweet, but we have to accept the fact that the probability of an average user providing something immaterially valuable to Twitter is a lot lower than it's on Facebook. Why? Facebook's vast amount of pictures and videos uploaded by the users. To create something worthy of snagging off of Twitter is hard. Uploading a cool photograph on Facebook that could be used in commercial work isn't that hard.
But what it all actually boils down to is: even if the Twitter TOS would give Twitter rights over the tweets so that they could sell them for money, without giving you a penny, why would they?
Think about it for a while.
Now that you've thought about it, consider which is more likely:
If you chose option 1, do you see Twitter having a future?
Oh, and if you chose option 1, please check the proper adjustment of your headgear.
