First contact with Facebook

Being already using LinkedIn and Video, I wasn’t really excited by joining yet another networking community, but a friend of mine kept saying that Facebook was different and more open and he convinced me to join insisting that his life would be easier if I joined a group he had created on this site.

You can’t join if Facebook judges you too old for them

Still only half convinced, I clicked on the link in the invitation he had sent me and found out that Facebook wanted to know my birth date. Being in a bad mood, I entered the earliest date that the web page lets you enter: « Jan 1st, 1910 » and the site told me:

                You must enter your real birthday to register.
                You can restrict who can see your birthday after you join.

I agree that there are probably not that many people born on « Jan 1st, 1910 » or before who will want to join Facebook, but denying them the right to join seems plain wrong to me.

Furthermore, you shouldn’t be forced to give a private information to join. It’s not only a matter of restricting who can see this information but also a matter of trusting the web site enough to want to give this information to them.

Extensive use of cookies

As you’ll have guessed, this is not the only thing that I have tried to test their registration procedure and I have also noticed that they store a bunch of cookies on your browser (around 6 of them can usually be seen). These cookies do not contain values in clear, but they are sensitive enough so that the error messages that you get from the site when you try weird things change if you delete them.

I tend to consider that as insane for all kind of well known technical reasons.

Not able to spell my name

After a while, I eventually got registered to see that they are not able to spell my name correctly.

My name is « Eric van der Vlist » and they keep displaying it as « Eric Van Der Vlist » whatever I do to change it.

This is just rude and disrespectful.

They use Flash

Meaning that a lot of features don’t work for people who, like me, do not want to install a flash plugin.

Abusive terms of use

This got me angry enough to make me read their terms of use and I find the following term really abusive:

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. 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 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. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

If I read it correctly, this means that they can reuse whatever I publish on their site whether I choose to make it readable only by me, by my friends or public and let’s say make a book with a distorted version of what I wrote.

They copyright even what you tell to their support

Why not contact their support rather than posting on my blog?

If you read ahead their terms of use, you’ll find this other interesting piece:

You acknowledge and agree that any questions, comments, suggestions, ideas, feedback or other information about the Site or the Service (« Submissions »), provided by you to Company are non-confidential and shall become the sole property of Company. Company shall own exclusive rights, including all intellectual property rights, and shall be entitled to the unrestricted use and dissemination of these Submissions for any purpose, commercial or otherwise, without acknowledgment or compensation to you.

Unlike the other stuff that you may post on their site for which you grant them non exclusive rights (meaning that you can at least re-use what you’ve contributed), you grant them exclusive rights over any feedback meaning that they can sue you if you want to reuse an idea that you’ve submitted!

Data lock-in

My friend had told me that Facebook was more open than other networking systems.

I find on the contrary that they are a most perfect example of the Data Lock-In area announced by Tim O’Reilly and that I was already mentioning in my first post about Web 2.0.

Are LinkedIn and Viadeo better? Probably not that much, but they seem less insidious to me because they are single purposed and do not tempt you, like Facebook tries to do, to share everything about you under their umbrella.