A MUST READ FOR EVERYBODY!

Facebook and Twitter are, of course, increasingly trying to prove that they can be real, self-sustaining businesses with meaningful revenues, and maybe even consistently positive cash flow. Good for them! But what about the rest of us -- the great unwashed masses of social-media addicts? What are we getting out of the deal? Before we get too far into this new decade, let's pull back a second and ask: Are we all just toiling mightily to make a bunch of rich nerds (Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and his employees and investors, Twitter's Biz Stone and Evan Williams and their employees and investors) richer, while we impoverish ourselves?

I'm not trying to be melodramatic here. For one thing, both Twitter and Facebook are demonstrably robbing us of our privacy -- and the sole ownership of our own thoughts, emotions, personal expressions, etc. (Or, rather, we're sitting back and allowing the theft to occur.) Last September in a column titled "Twitter: A Vampire That Can Legally Suck the Life Out of You," I wrote that Twitter had made little-noticed changes to its TOS (Terms of Service) that give it the right to do whatever it wants with your tweets. Though you "retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services," that's merely a technicality, because if you use Twitter you're automatically giving it "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)." And sure enough, after my column was published, Twitter ended up doing deals to license its data stream -- your and my tweets -- to Google and Bing for their search engines. Meanwhile, Facebook got all sneaky with its TOS at the end of the year. If you haven't yet read Ryan Tate's Dec. 14 Valleywag post titled "Facebook's Great Betrayal," it's a great place to start to understand how Facebook suddenly changed its business relationship with you. "Facebook's privacy pullback isn't just outrageous," Tate begins, "it's a landmark turning point for the social network. ... The company has, in short, turned evil." But privacy isn't all we're giving away.As of this writing, Twitter has just 156 employees. Facebook currently says it has "1,000+" employees -- a shockingly tiny work force for a site with 350 million active users. Neither company needs a lot of warm bodies because you and I are doing most of the work: perpetually creating and uploading vast amounts of fresh content that Twitter and Facebook can do with as they please.

AdAge
Jan 11 2009