Facebook gets a little Two Faced!

If you are not a fan of Facebook then stop reading. This will most likely not interest you. If you have discovered Facebook, for the crack cocaine like addiction that it is, and you don't want to know about the man behind the curtain-then please-SPOILER ALERT-stop reading. For all the rest of you (and a special shout out to my blogs Louisville, KY fans-which is ranking behind Knoxville for Pandora Box followers,) read on.

Some of you might have read about the hullabaloo about Facebook and their new terms of service. For those who haven't-here are some excerpts from an article by Catharine P. Taylor in Social Media Insider:

... In case you never read back to the beginning of it all, earlier this month the company quietly changed its terms of service, to say that Facebook users were now granting "Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense)" to do whatever it wanted with anything they posted.... By early this morning, Facebook had, not surprisingly, reconsidered -- returning, temporarily, to its old TOS while it works on new ones. Before Facebook made this latest about-face Mark Zuckerberg was saying that, despite the new TOS, there was actually no change to the company ethos "that people own their information and control who they share it with ... " If Facebook was really planning on changing its TOS so that it had the rights to user content, what to make of that statement?

It's almost as though Facebook got hold of the standard freelance writer contract and slipped it into the TOS just to see if anyone would notice.As all of us know by now, someone did... This reminds me a bit of David Ogilvy, who once said, "The consumer is not a moron, she's your wife." I'd like to think that if D.O. were alive today he might add, "And she's got a megaphone."....Fortunately, Zuckerberg says that as the company works to alter its TOS in coming weeks, "users will have a lot of input in crafting these terms." That's great, but it looks as though users are already giving their input.

I am in the syndicating content business. This is fairly crazy stuff. I read it to mean that FB can take any pic, video or whatever that I upload and use it for whatever they please-including to profit from my personal media. Not cool. Here's hoping they turn this around-STAT!!!