Facebook spins on a dime over TOS
Here is a story evolving so fast it will make your head spin. Facebook changed it’s TOS (Terms of Service) agreement, and within 48 hours changed it back. Here are the events (as related to FB and Mashable):
2/16 (8:24 am)
- FB changes Terms of Services Agreement. Mashable blogs about it (1k diggs):
2/16 (3:45 pm)
- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responds to the concerns as to why the change in the TOS
2/16 – 2/17
- Facebook polls users in their feed to the changes. Mashable asks the same question.
2/17 (11:49 pm)
- Facebook reverts to it’s old TOS
The FB blog link is down (due to traffic), but here it is.
From a business perspective that seems a little weak willed. I assume there was a business objective for changing the TOS. I wonder what the impact was on the FB usage or business. I mean other than the uproar over the last 2 days. Like one individual pointed out here, how many people actually ever even read the Terms of Service for any web site?
Maybe FB looked at the people being vocal as a sampling of their user group. Maybe that combined with some vision statement that says, “We will put our users 1st” led them to some swift action. Seeing a company react to its’ consumers so quickly is great. I am just curious if the swift change is based around acknowledgment of a corp. misstep or back peddling due to public outcry.
These course of events may have worked out for FB, but can it really be applied to other organizations? I think the group that would fit into this category is relatively small at this point. First, a lot of companies are not connected to their consumers the way FB is. Second, changing the wording in the terms of service is one thing but in a lot of instances there are more factors that would need to be taken into consideration for change to be implemented (ex: features, pricing, options).
From a consumer perspective I think it is great that FB listened and reacted so quickly. From a business perspective it makes me wonder about the corporate flip flopping.
What do you think?
Mashable.com has been covering this topic pretty closely, you can follow it here for all the details:
http://mashable.com/2009/02/17/breaking-facebook-reverts-to-previous-terms-of-service/
Well, it was turning into a PR nightmare for them because the language was so severe and they just rolled it out with no explanation. I don’t think it changed much as far as what their terms already were, because when you post something on the internet it is gone anyway.
In my opinion, it was more about stopping the PR debacle that was snowballing into a full blown FB bashing fest, looking at the language and maybe re-introducing it at a later date and in a better way.
Mo’money mo’ problems? Mo’ users mo’ problems.