Twitter and Adobe both got dinged this year for making statements in their Terms of Use that neither company exactly meant. Twitter’s said that it reserved the right to “to warn and/or ban people who use their service to “abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users”. Adobe’s gave Adobe a license to use any photos anyone edited with Photoshop Express online service- for any purpose.
When faced with a request to warn and/or ban an alleged Twitter stalker, Twitter realized it didn’t want to take such an aggressive editorial stance at all and would rather let users be responsible for their own content. Adobe corrected itself to say it didn’t plan to use anyone’s photos for just anything, so both statements were really mistakes.
As others have pointed out, terms of use are not complicated. They do need to be correct for the situation, though. Twitter and Adobe probably just grabbed someone else’s terms without a lot of thought and got nailed on it. AOL got nailed much worse by the Ninth Circuit for changing terms mid-stream without properly notifying users of its newly-acquired Talk America service.
The mild irony is that any good lawyer would also grab other sites’ terms of use, but instead of finding one set, s/he would take a look at a few sites, pick and choose the best/most applicable provisions and create something tailored to the site’s actual business.
All of which goes to prove the old saw- haste makes waste. It frequently doubles the legal fees too.
I’ve recently started to receive a surge of invitations to yet another professional social network (which shall remain nameless). I still haven’t figured out how Open Social or anything like it will actually affect life in the real world. Will I suddenly be on people’s networks in lots of places after making one uber-connection? That seems desirable and undesirable at the same time.
Still, I know this. I checked out the social network for which I am currently receiving invitations. I can’t figure out if it is useful or not. However, I do know that building my “social graph” on any network is time-consuming. As a result I am accepting these invitations on the off chance that the network turns out to be valuable someday. Is the alternative to Open Social just to be “easy”?
VentureBeat linked to a really clever video parody of the current web scene, linked below. I watched the whole thing, which is rare for me. The thing that is driving me crazy, though, is that I can almost, but not quite, place the tune to which the lyrics are set. If anyone can help me out please put a note in the comments.
Update: about 20 second after posting this I figured it out. The tune is Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire. I feel much better now.
I was in college when the first Gulf War happened, and I remember the school setting up a TV to show the round-the-clock (a new concept then) coverage on the upstart CNN network. People more media-savvy than I credit CNN’s rise in esteem and viewership to that coverage.
The fires tearing through Southern California are relevant to a much smaller population, to be sure, and I doubt Twitter will benefit to even 1% the same degree in absolute terms. However, many people- and media outlets- that previously dismissed it as a toy or a distraction are going to start paying attention because it is actually a convenient vehicle for distributing news in disaster environments. It is:
*Lightweight. It works nicely even on a mobile browser. No TV or computer required from the sending or receiving ends.
*Easy to update. It’s type-and-go. No setting up cameras or preparing to broadcast.
*Easy to aggregate. Tracking makes it possible to pull in tweets from lots of sources on the same subject.
*And perhaps most important, short (or “pithy” if you prefer). The problem with reporting disasters is that there usually isn’t much to report from minute-to-minute. Twitter lets networks broadcast tidbits as they become available.
Imagine if the news crawl at the bottom of a network broadcast was actually a Twitter feed. They serve basically the same purpose, and then there would be a place to find the crawl text one missed because one was watching the top part of the TV screen.
I’m not saying Twitter is suddenly going to be on everyone’s lips everywhere, just that people are going to realize it can be a really useful adjunct to other media distribution systems.
I wrote a case study on Jumpstart Automotive Media for Startup Review that published last night. Jumpstart is a vertical ad network focused on the automotive segment. It was founded in 2000 and sold this year, so it’s a timely piece given the proliferation of vertical ad networks over the past couple of years.
Mitch is also an extremely savvy and articulate guy. He knows well why his business worked and has some good thoughts for entrepreneurs, especially in regard to finding one’s niche, staying true to a goal and the importance of hiring top-nothc people.