Greg Reinacker’s Weblog

Sigh.

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about Picasa Web Albums, discussing their terms of service and explaining why I couldn’t use it. Basically, those terms said that Google could help themselves to your photos if they wish, and if they wanted to put them on a Google billboard in Times Square, that would be just fine with you, thanks.

Well, Facebook is also helping themselves to your content. From their terms of use:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

This is just nuts. Basically, they’re welcome to take your stuff, make a copy, and use it for a multi-million dollar ad campaign if they want. Or, they could license YOUR photo to someone else to do the same.

Unbelievable.

If you’re thinking “hey, I don’t care” – read the part about you having the right to grant this license to Facebook. It’s possible you don’t – read my previous post about Picasa for details.

So other than my profile pic, which I suppose they can use for whatever they like, I’ve removed all of my photos from my Facebook profile. My profile is now pretty bare – not a lot of exciting stuff there. I’ll just point people to other places where I actually share some of the things I’ve done without worrying about some company helping themselves to whatever rights they want.

Facebook, you convince your partners to help you help yourself to my private information. You blatantly help yourself to whatever rights you want to everything I put on your site. What’s next? I shudder to imagine.

[via CBC News]

We’ve got a lot of big news today at NewsGator.

First, we’ve got new releases of our most popular applications: FeedDemon 2.6, NetNewsWire 3.1, Inbox 3.0 (beta), and NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile 2.0. Each of these is a pretty major release on its own – tons of new features in all of them.

But second, every one of those applications is now free! Free as in beer, that is. And add to the free list NewsGator Go! for BlackBerry as well. And not only are they free, but our online services (including synchronization) are now free as well! Not to mention our iPhone reader, HTML mobile reader, and all of the other applications that are part of our online platform.

I haven’t been this excited about our consumer products and strategy since we bought FeedDemon and NetNewsWire a couple of years ago.

But I can hear you asking already…”why, Greg, why would you do such a thing?”

What we’re working to do is to saturate the market with our clients. Anyone who wants a rich experience for consuming content, or anyone who uses multiple computers or devices and wants a best-of-breed experience on each can now use our clients. Using a Mac at home, along with an iPhone? NetNewsWire and our iPhone reader will sync up. Have a PC at the office? FeedDemon will sync with your other two applications. And they’ll all sync with NewsGator Online. It all just works.

There are two reasons we want our clients to become ubiquitous. Well, three if you count “we want to be nice.” But two other reasons. :-)

First, we’ve found that when we go into an enterprise to sell NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES) and Social Sites, there are already a ton of people using one of our desktop apps already. The more folks are already using them, the easier it is to sell our server products – especially since these client apps can sync with NGES directly. So, the more the merrier – we’re going to make sure that everyone who wants to use our apps can do so, without having to climb over the hump of having to dig out their credit card.

And second, we want to collect “attention” data (actually I like to call this activity data, but everyone else in the world calls it attention) and use it to make everyone’s experience better. If there is a specific feed you love, and you’re constantly emailing its articles to friends or saving articles in your clippings, that’s interesting…and if there are a lot of people doing this, it’s probably a good indicator about the “relevancy” of that content for other users. Similar with individual articles that are getting a lot of attention from users. Basically, by using your data, in combination with aggregate data from other users, we can deliver a better experience for everyone. And that’s a good thing – both for us and for you.

We’ve taken some small steps along these lines so far in the client applications – watch over the next few months as these capabilities really start to come into their own, and roll out both in the online reader and continue to evolve in the clients.

We’ve talked about APML in the past, and said we’d implement APML export in the clients. We’re going to take that a step further – and implement an endpoint in our online platform where you (and only you!) can always access your personal APML data. That data will be a rollup of all of your activity across all of our clients that you use. We’re also going to make aggregate data available via API. You should start to see all of this start rolling out within the next couple of months.

So anyway – this is great news! I’m personally really excited about this, and I’m looking forward to hearing from you. There are a lot of details I didn’t cover here…so here are a couple of links with more info.

Press release

Q&A – details as to upgrades, refunds, etc.

Some folks at Microsoft have posted a story about NewsGator on the Microsoft Startup Zone – Where Are They Now – NewsGator Revisited:

“Social software and Enterprise 2.0 are hot topics right now, and RSS plays a fundamental role in Enterprise 2.0…”

Now, in fairness, that’s my own quote – but that doesn’t make it any less true. :-)