Week in the Knees: How in 10 Days Facebook Screwed Up, Backed Up & Once Again Surprised Us

Over at the official Facebook blog, the creation of a new Terms of Service is humming right along. At least, it was until they made a pretty radical decision (for a company with any valuation, even if it's a mythical $15 billion): a Terms of Service might not be what they need.

In their own words from the entry:

"We sat down to work on documents that could be the foundation of this and we came to an interesting realization—that the conventional business practices around a Terms of Use document are just too restrictive to achieve these goals. We decided we needed to do things differently and so we're going to develop new policies that will govern our system from the ground up in an open and transparent way."

Let's all keep in mind that this is about 10 days from the moment when they slightly tweaked their terms of service to largely keep legal wolves from the door and it sparked outrage. Smartly, they recognized that the outrage was less about the change than about the concepts and possible interpretation of their existing terms of service. They switched it back within 48 hours and promised to ask us nicely next time. (The ordeal as a whole we blogged about here.) But more than that seems to be happening. In a way that the Beacon controversy did not continue after a minor reversal on opt-in, Facebook has actually demonstrated that they took the spirit of the backlash to heart, not just the backlash itself.

As Zuckerberg himself describes, Facebook has decided to more carefully define who they are and what users mean to them by banishing the Terms of Use/Service and making two distinct new documents:

"The first is the Facebook Principles, which defines your rights and will serve as the guiding framework behind any policy we'll consider—or the reason we won't consider others. The second document is the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which will replace the existing Terms of Use."

I encourage you to check out and at least browse, but hopefully participate in, the two Groups that have been created.  It's an extrodinary moment of transparency, even if only possible through the public hand-slapping (from the public) of a week ago.  The most intriguing question is whether Facebook had to make such a transformative step in reaction.  I fully anticipated a thin gloss of public opportunity to submit changes and then a few dozen lawyer opinions later a ToS pops out quietly that is somehow even more vague, uninteresting and sleepily ignored.  This is the utility busy brain-damaging youth by inciting short attention spans, after all, and it appears as though they didn't just hit the undo button on a Tweet worth of additions, but they actually took one for the team.  Hard.  Like a baseball bat to the knees, and then got up and apologized to the guy who threw it.  Did all those 55 year-old women coming on board bring some good ole-fashioned guilt with them?

Again I remind us all: can we even imagine a Microsoft, a Ford, a Sony, a McDonalds or a Wal-Mart doing this?  Nevermind just a company leading their industry but one with so much to lose?  I am not absolving Facebook of fault, but I do applaud them for responding to issues of trust with an above-board apology, engagement and inclusion.  That must be frustrating for detractors, not to mention competitors. When can we expect NewsCorp to open MySpace's Fox-ian ToS for discussion?

The Facebook Town Halls for the proposed statements:
The Facebook Principles Group
The Statement of Rights and Responsibilities Group

 -Dean

P.S. Recently Facebook allowed us to change the names of groups we administer- finally!  Thanks, but most of us have moved onto Pages that we can't change the name of now. :)