I’ll be presenting at the DC Pecha Kucha night next Wednesday at the Corcoran in downtown DC near the White House. I’ll be presenting on the short film Meticulous made called “The Sandbox” in a 20 minute, 20 seconds per slide showdown. Hope to see you there!

About week ago Facebook changed its Terms of Use. Their Corporate Counsel, Suzie White, announced this on the company blog and explained what they had done and why in their minds the changes were necessary. This massive sweep up was to consolidate various documents into one central document and to “simplif[y] and clarif[y]” the terms and information contained therein.

They didn’t have to provide notice, but they did, and for that, I applaud them. You don’t have to agree to the terms, and they are non-negotiable. Use implies acceptance, and says so in the first paragraph of the Terms. If you don’t like that, you can go elsewhere.

We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change or delete portions of these Terms [of Use] at any time without further notice. Your continued use of the Facebook Service after any such changes constitutes your acceptance of the new Terms.

The new Terms document has some serious issues with the way it handles content that users upload. “Content is king,” as the old dot-com era adage states, and without content, Facebook wouldn’t really be all that. Why do we return to Facebook? Why do people spend inordinate amounts of time locked into the site?

Content.

We return to read about what our friends and family are doing. We check out their pictures from vacation. We comment back and forth over the most inane status messages. We used to engaged in Scrabulous tourneys, but of course, that was a copyright infringement. I’m sure something has replaced that in the past months.

So content brings eyeballs, and Facebook sells advertising to those eyeballs. That is how and where Facebook’s income stream resides. Advertising. Without content, that advertising stream would dry up. We post content and Facebook places advertising around it. We find that to be okay because the service is free and actually works pretty great. That seems to be a fair trade. I’ll look at the ads on occasion and might even click on one.

The Rub

So what happens with the content you post? Facebook, according to their new Terms, for all intents and purposes, owns it.

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses.

This is the problem with contracts. Legalese and contracts are written in order to protect the interests of the individual (be it a person or a corporation, which is seen as an individual under the law) from legal issues. Contracts are supposed to stop people from going to court. Usually, these contracts are negotiated between two parties. When one term dictates the terms and you must accept (e.g. a software license, terms of use, etc.) you have what is, in effect, a contract of adhesion.

adhesion contract n.(contract of adhesion) a contract (often a signed form) so imbalanced in favor of one party over the other that there is a strong implication it was not freely bargained. Example: a rich landlord dealing with a poor tenant who has no choice and must accept all terms of a lease, no matter how restrictive or burdensome, since the tenant cannot afford to move. An adhesion contract can give the little guy the opportunity to claim in court that the contract with the big shot is invalid. This doctrine should be used and applied more often, but the same big guy-little guy inequity may apply in the ability to afford a trial or find and pay a resourceful lawyer.

The Consumerist and the Cnet have both taken the company to task [ 1 | 2 ] over this and it got the CEO to come out in an attempt to put out the fires. Mark Zuckerberg posted on the corporate blog saying that Facebook would never do anything of the sort and they just wanted to make sure they could deliver things appropriately to other users. The problem is that what Mark says here is not legally binding. The parol evidence rule clearly states that no matter what a party to a contract states verbally, the written contract is the determining factor. The Terms of Use, constituting the contract between you, the user, and Facebook, are the only things that matters. Let’s look at some examples:

The Musician

Effectively, as a musician, if I post an mp3 on Facebook of Juniper Lane’s new song “Don’t You Give Up”, and it becomes a big hit, Facebook can make money off that and I can’t say squat about it. Although, if it were a big hit, I’m sure my record label would take Mr. Zuckerberg, et al to the bar in short order and have more paperwork filed in the first 24 hours than most people see in their lifetime.

The Photographer

Let’s use a more common example. You’re a decent photographer. You take a picture. Facebook likes it. They use it commercially. You’d get paid right? Nope. That nifty little phrase “including commercial or advertising” covers them in that. You’re simply out of luck. All for uploading a picture via Facebook to show your friend.

The Reality

Most of us aren’t a record label, or Facebook, or have deep pockets for legal fees. We’re people. In modern courts, it comes down to paperwork. A friend of mine, working as a paralegal in downtown DC, described it as “it’s not who’s right, but he whole files the most paperwork that wins.” With things such as “boxcar discovery”, where a side will deliver, in effect, a warehouse of paperwork to go through, it’s almost impossible to take on a company like Facebook. WHile this can go in both directions, Facebook could simply bury a Plaintiff in an excess of paper, unending in the reply to simple requests for production.

So my challenge to you, Mr. Zuckerberg, et al: Say what you mean, exactly, in your terms of service. Strike overreaching phrases such as “including commercial or advertising” and remember that those people you have as your users provide every penny of your current valuation. Start driving them away, and you may have larger problems than content lawsuits on your hands.

UPDATE Facebook has decided to revert to their old Terms for the time being and established a public working group entitled the Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities group. THis already has over 30,000 members but sadly already has drivel in the discussions of “Can someone give me one logical reason to believe in God?”

Berlusconi Says Leaders May Close World’s Markets | The Italian Prime Minister would like to suspend the markets for a short time in order to “rewrite the rules of international finance.” Well, the problem I see is that you have debt. And not only people but governments living excessively outside their means. Fiat currencies not backed by gold and you basically have a bunch of paper that people say has a certain value. When that paper gets traded at 20 times its value, it’s only a matter of time until that becomes untenable. And it is going to correct. If they keep the markets from sinking further in number, they do it in actuality through inflation. Just look at Zimbabwe, Argentina, etc. to see where this could end up for us.

AIG Draws Fire for Executives’ $440,000 Post-Bailout Retreat at Posh California Resort | Shock. Amazement. Bewilderment. The government bails you out because you screwed up and what do you do? Fix it? NO. You go on a fscking resort and pay for $6 diet cokes on the company (now taxpayer) dime. These people should have their personal assets taken from them to pay back the 85 billion (or part of it) and get a pittance of a salary to fix it. Or they can just quit. Or they can go to jail. I like door number three myself. “Executive Douchebag? meet Bubba. He likes men.”

Jim Cramer: Get Out of the Market | Jim Cramer recommends that people get the heck out of the market if you plan on using that money in the next five years. We heard something similar from our USAA advisers about 6 months ago when this all started to rumble with the sub-prime debacle. But this is going mainstream. Will this affect a sell-off of large proportions?

Settlement Day Approaches For Derivatives | Derivatives are really the 800 lb. Gorilla in the corner that everyone’s been ignoring. If these things go, get ready for fun.

Is This A Replay of 1929? | No. And that’s a relief. Newsweek’s Robert J. Samuelson talks about the differences and similarities between now and the Great Depression. Also see The End of Prosperity, Time’s look at similar concerns.

Worst Case Scenario Is Approaching Rapidly | The European Union is in chaos as certain countries jump out of step to secure their own domestic banking accounts.

As the bailout has passed the Senate and the House, it appears to be the law of the land. $700,000,000,000.00 dollars. That’s a lot of zeros. “700 Billion” doesn’t look as bad as $700,000,000,000.00 does it? It seems that everyone is now lining up for money because of the credit crisis. California is asking for $7 Billion ($673B left) to “pay for teachers salaries, nursing homes, law enforcement and ever other state-funded service” [emphasis mine].

Two quotes are applicable:

“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”
-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to the Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin (1802)

“The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people, until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the republic destroyed.”
– Abraham Lincoln, November 21, 1864, a letter to William F. Elkins

Telling indeed.

And now to read about others blaming religion for making them financially insolvent due to "Prosperity theology". The thought “that God would ‘make a way’ for poor people to enjoy the better things in life” is more than a little disconcerting. The way is, and always has been, work. There are no entitlements. You deserver absolutely nothing in life. And some of the things that are most important to you will be suddenly and mercilessly taken away from you. God didn’t want you to get a house. God didn’t want your loved one to die. Let me be perfectly clear in my belief on this:

God doesn’t act.

He cares, okay. Fine. I’ll go with that. But if God’s hand is at work everywhere, then free will cannot exist. And saying “it’s God’s way” is another means for one to absolve themselves of responsibility for the actions that the take on a daily basis.

Take responsibility for yourself. Live within your means. Strive to improve your situation. Don’t give up on life. Don’t expect a handout. And don’t blame God for your problems.

People are to blame.

Hello, friends. We’re your usability consultants.

Is your web app tired? Run down? Listless? Does it poop out at diggings? Is it unpopular on del.icio.us?

The answer to all of your problems is in this little bottle consulting package. Hyphenated People Prix Fixe. Yes, Hyphenated People Prix Fixe contains vitamins, meat, vegetables, and minerals and 150% of your daily dosage of usability expertise.

Yes, with Hyphenated People Prix Fixe you can buy your way to web application health. All you do is take a big dose after every meal once. It’s so tasty, too. Tastes just like candy. So why don’t you join the thousands of happy peppy people and order your Hyphenated People Prix Fixe today. That’s Hyphenated People Prix Fixe.

Hyphenated People Prix Fixe

Over at Hyphenated People, we’ve been spending the summer cooking up something new: a fixed-price deal. Fun and challenging for us, and affordable for you.

For a flat rate, you can choose either:

• The Inspector. In which we explore and analyze your entire application¹ and deliver to you a fancy report including a written analysis (including callouts and sketches) and suggestions for improvement. Topics considered include application structure, flow, individual screens’ usability and layout, insights about targeted users, and aesthetics (aka “the pretty”).
• The Drive-By Design. In which we explore your application, and thence, with that knowledge, take any single, full page of your choosing and redesign it from the ground up to be more effective. In this case we deliver to you a fully-realized design, original design source files (PSDs) and a written explanation of our recommendations for that page and its situation in the entire application.

Either package is ideal for smaller companies and startups, and anyone who is having a difficult time loosening the purse strings for hiring usability consultants for a long-term project.

There’s no further obligation. Our reports and advice are yours. We will happily make ourselves available for further assistance (availability permitting), but you can implement our suggestions any way you want, and with whomever you want.

That Price, Which is Fixed

The price for either package is just $3,500 USD. If you’d like further details, drop us a line at yo@hyphenateme.com with your preferred method of contact and we’ll give you a prompt return call or email.

Write us now. You know you want to.

Nota bene: We’re only budgeting the time for a few of these projects this summer. It’d be a clever marketing tactic to make that up and then urge you to contact us now if not sooner, but it’s actually true. This is something we’ll be doing in addition to our normal, larger jobs. We will of course deliver our very best (as we always do), but this is an experiment for us from a business standpoint.

[1] This assumes a fairly typically sized application: similar to or bigger than Basecamp, smaller than Salesforce.

This past week, my business partner, Amy Hoy and her fianceé, Thomas Fuchs, created something so simple and so damn cool based on the twitter API and some great javascript. It’s called Twistori

They built it and launched it in one day and announced it solely with one post on twitter each.

Check it out. You’ll be hooked.

Way overdue, but I finally have posted my SXSW photos to flickr.

Amy and I gave our panel on the first day of SXSW interactive and it was a blast. It was nice to have it out of the way so we could chill and enjoy the rest of the week. Despite a one day sickness that I warded off (and developed into South By Scurvy upon my return to DC) I was out and about at the conference center and Sixth Street Environs.

Here’s the breakdown of Photos:

SXSW Interactive

SXSW Music

Hotel Café Tour @ Parish

Sara Bareilles @ Parish

Honor by August (my band) at the 7th & Trinity Guitar Hero Stage (photos by our manager Trish on my camera)

and finally, but not least of all, Paramore at La Zona Rosa

The talk that Amy Hoy and I gave at SXSW this year is now online at behyphenated.com. Check it out!

Our talk pitch: Zen masters taught it. Isaac Newton knew it. Scott Adams writes about it. Now you can know it, too. We’re talking, of course, about the manifold benefits of being a n00b (at something). And, of course, about all the good stuff that happens post-n00bishness: the excellent side effects of being good at multiple things, even if they’re not related – heck, especially if they’re not related. So many of humanity’s important discoveries, innovations and beautiful leaps of logic have been made by people whose brains were leveled up by the cross-fertilization of multiple interests and disciplines. Nano-thin specialization is out, a broad understanding of life, the universe, and everything is in. It’s time to synergize, baby. So, reach outside your comfort zone, be a beginner again, and you’ll be smarter, sexier, better at your job… even more valuable. With the wisdom of the ages (and a little bit from modern pundits), we’ll talk about how, why, when, and where you can go about it. You won’t regret it.

Gary Vaynerchuk is one of our clients and a brilliant promoter and people person. While down here at SXSW this weekend, he got fed up with the crap lines outside the overcrowded official parties and sent out a ping:

"Huge free wine event at mariott lobby …. Sorry 16 bit"

...and the masses showed up mighty quick As the article says, it wasn’t on the event listings, it wasn’t an official party, and it got shut down by the hotel for being too loud. And it was one of the most enjoyable parties of the week.

Now that, my friends, is how rockstars do it.

I recently completed two sleeves for some far flung clients (and friends). The first is for Spectre’s new release:

Ryan Hudson, the band’s singer, sent me a variety of lightwire creation photos he made. Mixing it together with the band’s wings logo and adding that to some distressed type worked out well. They just had their CD release party at the Key Club in Hollywood. Not only do they have great originals, but they completely rock a cover of Sade’s “No Ordinary Love”.

The second disc is for my friend Daniel from Texas. He performs under the name of Johnny Citizen and his new record:

I met Daniel years ago at the Dr. Dremo’s open mic and we kept in touch through a few long years on both accounts. He had these great drawings from a friend of his and we put them together into a digipak sleeve.

Anyway, you can get these records from various locations. They’re both great and you should check them out!

Amy and I have been accepted to a new thing at SXSWi coming up in March in Austin, TX. It’s called a “Core Conversation” and we’ll be holding one on our concept deemed “Career Rev 342: Dabble Dabble, Toil and Kick Ass”. The basic premise revolves around a lot of what Amy and I have been through: broad, multi-faceted learning, generally out of the classroom, and lots of nose to the grindstone. It’s also a discussion about how mutliple facets improve team interactions (as opposed to specialists who don’t understand each other’s specialties).

We don’t have any details yet, but we’ll update you as we move towards March.

My business partner Amy just put up a new article at Vitamin that discusses product pages and how to make them not suck so much. It’s a great and quite in-depth read along with some nifty flow charts and screen capture skadoodle action. It’s a great overview on why user experience can make or break a web site and specifically a product page.

The city of Newport News has released the software that runs their website free of charge to any organization or individual. The series of Plone-based products is not the only thing they are releasing. Andy Stein, the IT director for the city, is also releasing the knowledge base, their best practices, documentation, standards, retrospectives/lessons learned, experiences on converting to a CMS, training materials, hardware and software configurations and setup, and various other things. These are released under the GPL.

“We intend to provide a low barrier to entry,” said Stein. “It should be simple and inexpensive to assess the level of fit with an organization’s needs. The same efficiency should apply through the entire product life-cycle: test period, deployment on intranet and/or Internet, maintenance, support and enhancements. ( from govtech.com )

Newport News isn’t a large city in the sense of Boston or Chicago, but it’s a decent mid-level American city with a diverse voter base and has a lot of the problems facing many post-industrial American cities. Newport News Shipbuilding is one of the main shipyards for the US Navy and has a downtown that’s a bit run down. I see this system as being a boon for many cities that are the size of Newport News or smaller that don’t have the funds to get this level of a site online. This also encourages more interaction in government, something that is sorely lacking in the one-way communication of the television era.

The code is available on the city website.

“Wait,” you say, “there’s only one?” Well, no, but there is the one that irks me the most at this moment

I just watched Leisa Reichelt’s presentation on Ambient Intimacy at FoWA London and it started churning my gears about the things that drive me nuts in social networking apps. We’ll call this the Problem of Interconnectivity (or the lack thereof). I’ll snarkily refer to it as “One App To Rule Them All”.

I am not talking about just one social network app that everyone uses and refusing to publish to the rest of the world. Leisa said “People use different types of applications to facilitate different forms of communication…” and I believe that to be true. But there’s a lot of overlap between different applications, and I want a touch point by which I can manage those various applications with ease.

The Problem

I spend a lot of time contributing to various parts of the social graph: LastFM, Facebook, Twitter, Pownce, Upcoming, Flickr, Dopplr, TripIt etc. etc. Each site has its own login and password. Each site has it’s ups and downs. Some are great and some aren’t so great. But I use them all, and many of them have overlapping datasets. For example, Myspace, Pownce, Facebook, LastFM and Upcoming all have event objects. Dopplr and TripIt contain ancillary information about those events. Flickr later will have photos associated with those events.

This means that I end up with redundant and split-up data. Not just in the publishing of data from me to the sphere, but also via the manner in which that information is commented upon and how feedback returns to me. I don’t mind that it comes back to me in various ways, but it’s difficult to find that comment that was not in the normal pipeline six months after the fact.

The problem, at the core, is one of time—a lack of time. It takes an excessive amount of time to update all of these sites on a regular basis. And it requires that I visit each and every site in turn in order to enter the aforementioned data. That takes about five to ten minutes per site. Adding one event can take 30 minutes or more. Even if I’m bulk loading, I can easily drop a few hours doing data entry.

There has to be a better way.

The Pieces That Exist

There are a variety of technologies that could facilitate these things to come together.

1. OpenID | A distributed identity system that lets you use one login across many applications.
2. APIs (or Application Programming Interfaces) | These are tools created by the developer of the application that allow for other developers to create interactions with that application. The API is a concept and a series of things that can be done. What one does with them is entirely different.
3. DHTML | Dynamic HTML is basically made up of the DOM (Document Object Model), XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This is the base of the building blocks for interacting in new ways with the browser.
4. XMLHttpRequest | Also known as XHR, this is the core of AJAX, this allows for things to happen in the background while one continues to interact with the application.
5. AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) | A new technology from Adobe, this allows for people to build either AJAX, Flash, or Flex applications and deploy them across multiple platforms utilizing the AIR framework.
6. Ruby | The Ruby Language is a very easy to use and very powerful programming language. With ERB and some light Apache hacking, you can use this without having to install a full stack framework (such as Rails)

There are a variety of other protocols and technologies that could also be employed (such as Jabber) but due to my lack of experience with them, I’ll provide them only a cursory mention.

A Potential Solution

It’s easy to consume these streams after the data is input via RSS). A great example of merging multiple streams into one is Jeremy Keith’s creation of a collected stream on his site. So we’ve got the ability to pull multiple RSS feeds into one location and display them in a new manner. I’ll write a post in the future about doing this with some lightweight ERB.

But sending to each of the sites becomes a much larger endeavor. The API is a series of potential calls, not a plug-and-play piece of code. So even with some heavy lifting, you still have to manually identify the data fields in the models you wish to update on the remote server and make the proper calls. This is great and horrible in the same breath. The power of the API means that you can, in fact, push the data into the system (in most cases). It’s just a lot of work for little, if any, reward for the developer of said system.

The most obvious example of something that i have difficulty with in this arena is events. I play a lot of shows in my band. I also do a lot with various travel for work. So, I’d want to add a show and have it add a show at MySpace, an event at Facebook, an event at Upcoming.org, an event on Pownce, and update my Dopplr account that I’m going to be in that location.

Or how about a blast status update to Twitter, Myspace, AIM, Pownce, and Facebook? Information is only as relevant as the last post. And if it’s easy to distribute, a more complete view of communication exhibits itself.

I’m sure there are even more potential uses that I can’t envision myself and that is the beauty of the web in that people will use systems in new and unexpected ways.

Potential Pitfalls

Let’s call it out right now. Public enemy number one in this space? Spam.

Any system that lowers the barriers for the mass push of information very quickly enables the spam attack that everyone dreads. Spam, however, is subjective. I think 99% of us would agree that penis enlargement and “Get your free viagra now!!!” are a complete waste of time, effort, and electrons. But where is the deciding line? If I post a show to my network is that spam? If I post about a web conference is that somehow different? If I’m speaking is it more spam-related than if I’m just attending?

Another potential pitfall is asyncrhonicity. This could be planned for using something like Adobe’s AIR system and intentionally alowing the user to input massive amounts of data into a submission queue. When the user connects to a network, the application begins to sync up with various APIs in succession. So that could be a benefit over a pitfall, but covering user expectations would be very important. Does it sync automatically? Does I have to hit a button? Does it save previous syncs? What happens if there’s an error in the sync? What if I was really looking for a kitchen sink?

Truly. A potentially insurmountable obstacle. Especially the garbage disposal.

So what next?

Well, after writing this I happened to be reading MetaFilter and saw a post to NoseRub, which claims to be a decentralized social network protocol that lets you sync data between places. It appears to be more of an aggregator as opposed to a publisher as far as can see by reading their about section.

I’m going to chew on this and come up with some visual ideas of how this might work. How would you like to see this kind of application work? Is it even possible?

The Future of Web Apps conference in London was a week or so ago, and I’ve finally gotten the photos online in a photoset at Flickr. Enjoy!