Jim Cavoli's dashboard

This is the singularly most important thing facebook should develop right now. They're over a year past the announcement, and we haven't had so much as a real status update.

Let's all tell facebook how much we want them to finish fb chat's Jabber/XMPP interface! - vote & comment here: http://bit.ly/VoteForFBChat

twitter.com/jimcavoli

All looks to be well again...thanks to James Wheare (jwheare) for keeping us posted on Fb.

Strong case; I must agree with you on that - a policy of informing police would also probably result in fewer violations - it's just harder to do on the Internet for most companies, so they end up doing the policing. Plus, there's a bit of a problem in the international nature of the Internet that makes enforcement of such a policy difficult or impossible to do in nations with differing views on rights and with different laws regarding speech and what's protected. To that end, corporations need to at least retain the right to handle things however they wish, but virtuously maybe elect not to most of the time, which is what twitter seems to be doing here. As I've said, they didn't do anything wrong, but generally, the web 2.0 social megalith enforces TOS and handles abuse fairly swiftly in the interest of "protecting users," which is usually the point of a TOS anyways - its an agreement to use the service in the way they define and you agree to. – Jim Cavoli, on May 26, 2008 17:40

I agree mdoeff, on the whole. I don't care which approach twitter takes as long as its a bit clearer which one they're going with. – Jim Cavoli, on May 25, 2008 13:44

It's really not the same thing - the TOS is different for GMail (and it is a fundamentally different technology - also its not public; I could go on). I do, however, agree that if they want a hands-off approach that they should get a lawyer and revise their TOS, which is what they're doing anyways.

Honestly, I don't care whether twitter takes a hands-on or -off approach to dealing with these sort of things, but right now they're sending some mixed signals. I'm sure they'll recover fine from this PR blow and move along with some clearer definition on their role and grow as a company from the experience. – Jim Cavoli, on May 25, 2008 13:18

It's really sad that twitter is taking this stance. It would be good for them to note that the online services which strictly enforce their TOS in what twitter evidently thinks is an unnecessary "mediator" stance are the most successful...a la Facebook and Flickr (hmmm...Flickr seems to be a recurring player in this discussion ... success ... protection ... oh well, probably irrelevant).

twitter, this isn't about the purpose of a communication tool (Mr. Goldman), nor the mediation of everything that goes on, but protecting your users. The fact that Facebook promptly reviews abuse notices that I submit has made me feel that much more comfortable and safe with their service and increased how much of a fan I am.

I haven't been on twitter for long at all, relatively, nor am I likely to leave any time soon because of this alone. However, that being said, this has given me a fairly negative general opinion of twitter's inner workings. I have nothing against any of you at twitter personally, but it seems your overall mission is a bit off track.

As far as allegations that Ariel started this to drive blog traffic, maybe she did, maybe she didn't, but either way, it is more important that the issue was handled and brought to the attention of twitter management and I believe that it most definitely has - with resounding clarity. Conflict of interest? I don't think so. After all, twitter and pownce have pretty different purposes, and that aside, she's not really gunning for twitter to take it down, and besides, she admits to being a twitter addict, God knows Kevin is, and so many of them ("them" here meaning the digg/rev3/pownce/kevin crew(s)) are addicted that seeing them try to take it off the net is ludicrous.

To conclude, thank you Ariel for raising awareness, and thank you twitter for clearing this up. Let's all file it away - not forget, but forgive - and move on.