We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any text and images you have stored in the system.

This seems like the right way to go to make people comfortable about using the freely use the system to transfer ideas that may contain pieces of intellectual property.

Kudos to Twitter for the straightforward rules over content copyright.

I happened across a great blog post from Chris Bucchere, founder and CEO of BDG – the folks behind The Social Collective.  In response to a post about Robert Scoble losing his Facebook account because it was mistaken for a spam account, Chris wrote:

If you think there are safer or better places than Facebook to put “your data” on the internet, you’re also mistaken. Take a peek at Google’s TOS. In particular, read section 11, where you hand over all rights to “your” content to them (except basic copyright, which you automatically have any time you produce an original work and put your name on it). You’re basically giving Google a free license to use your content — even for their own commercial gain!

For your reading ease, here’s the part of Google’s TOS in particular that Chris was referencing:

By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive licence [sic] to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

(Yes, Google’s TOS agreement does indeed include a misspelling of the word license.)

Chris goes on to point out that this is because Google intends to parse the content and make it available to advertisers so that they’ll know what advertisements to display to you.  The exact section of Google’s TOS doesn’t indicate that you lose any rights over the content that you enter.  You still retain a irrevocable license over it.  But it is clear that Google claims a right to reuse it as they need, and to transfer that right to anyone else.

This brings up an interesting scenario, although probably somewhat unlikely.  Imagine if you posted some great ideas about a product you were building on Google Docs, and you had no intention of disclosing this information with any of your competitors because it was so fantastic.  What would happen if Google either purposefully or accidentally stole that very idea and started building a competing site?  This gets into a legal area that I’m totally unfamiliar with, but would love to find an IP lawyer who might be able to work out the possibilities.  It would seem, though, that Google could make claim that the work you posted was prior art, making any claim to a patent you might have (or be in the process of filing) void and null.

I’m no fan of software patents, though, but I am curious what might happen.

Oh, and remember that Google promised if they do use your ideas, you’ll at least get a shout-out on their blog.

Imagine, for example, if instead of a lot of political posturing and politeness, my vendor just told me straight up that my ideas were dumb and suggested better ones instead.  It’d take bravery on the part of the vendor to tell me the truth, and maturity on my part to not be insulted and dismiss the critical feedback.

Am I wrong to want the world to change?  I’m probably just being too much of an idealist. 

The reality is that these cases highlight the flaw in the default privacy level set by social networking sites today – especially Twitter, where it seems like most people don’t realize that anyone can view your posts unless you lock it down, and that if your friends don’t also lock their feeds down, their replies to you would be visible to the world.

I do believe, though, that operational transparency in the enterprise is a great way to give employees the opportunity to serendipitously discovery the information that might make the deal, save the day or otherwise make the company successful. (I love that phrase, so I’ll repeat it: “serendipitous discovery”.)

So while social transparency on a very personal level is probably going too far, there is a benefit to be had by keeping your co-workers in the loop on what you’re busy working on.

Come to think of it, the one person who comes to mind who tends to be very transparent and open about himself is Howard Stern.  I’m not so sure that’s worked out in his favor over the long run.  He’s famous, but it seems like it’s taken a pretty hard toll on his personal life.

In case that was way too complicated for you to understand, here’s my web 2.0 business plan in three easy phases:

This was pretty much the plan for everyone from Digg to FriendFeed, Twitter to Facebook.  And despite the obvious flaw of not really having a phase two, these companies still exist and are still fully operational.  Granted, several web 2.0 companies have entered the deadpool (Pownce, for example), but a lot of the ones you might have thought would be dead and out of money by now are still up and running, which is pretty darned amazing considering that they lack any publicly known business plans.

Twitter is already trying to figure out exactly what their business plan is, and in fact they’ve recently hired someone to help them figure out how they’ll make money – Twitter recently hired Kevin Thau who hails from past ventures Buzzwire and Openwave.  It’s hard to imagine what Twitter might do even just to cover what are likely to be increasingly expensive costs to run and maintain their infrastructure.

But that doesn’t explain one small, minor detail that I still can’t figure out: how is it that these companies got any VC funding without presenting any real business plans?  And furthermore, why is it that companies like Yammer, Present.ly and even IBM are taking concepts directly from Twitter and already making real money on them before Twitter ever even turns over a single dime?  I’m not criticizing these companies for creating similar functional offerings – to the contrary, the fact that they seem to have a good business a plan speaks highly of their possible futures.

Upon reflection, I think it’s probably wrong of me to include Facebook in the list of web 2.0 startups that don’t really have a solid business plan.  I do believe they had always intended to advertise to their users, and that they could do this more effectively by selling ad space on profiles that matched demographics that their marketers are after.  I had also written last month that I do believe they have enough momentum going to find a steady revenue stream before going under.

But that doesn’t explain what Twitter, Digg or FriendFeed or similar services will do if the costs of running their infrastructure outpace their funding.  They’re all great tools to share and discover content (and generate endless memes), but if push came to shove I think I could probably give up most of them and rely on Facebook to provide the same or similar functionality.

That’s enough for now.  I’d better get back to enjoying my favorite web 2.0 sites while they last.

According to the company press release:

LotusLive is designed to help companies work smarter by making it easy for them to connect and work together — with an emphasis on simplicity and ease of use. LotusLive’s online services give businesses of all sizes access to Lotus’ rich collaboration tools without requiring an up-front investment in IT support resources or infrastructure.

What’s most interesting about this news is IBM’s plans to partner with several key SaaS vendors:

• LinkedIn will provide LotusLive with searchable contact information.
• Salesforce.com will integrate LotusLive services within its CRM application.
• Skype announced plans to integrate voice and video into LotusLive.

Right now only LotusLive Meetings (Lotus Sametime) and LotusLive Events along with the hosted Notes application appear to be available for purchase, with the other solutions still showing up as being in beta.  I wasn’t able to find details on when IBM plans to make the additional functionality available.

The dashboard page for the collaboration component looks a lot like what you might expect from a "web2.0” site, and is actually pretty slick looking.

Even without the details about when it’ll be available, it’s exciting news from IBM, and it stacks up nicely against Microsoft and their plans for more SaaS offerings with the upcoming Office 14 release, as well as Google’s recent push to start selling Google Apps through their recently announced reseller program.

More details at LotusLive.com, full LotusLive press release at IBM.

I started thinking about this more today, and I came up with what I believe is a more or less accurate picture of the high-level areas of social computing, or for lack of a better term, the community platform:

So, what’s in a community platform?  Let’s take a look…

Knowledge Management

• Sharing: the ability for users to upload, tag and rate content, the ability to broadcast what you are working on (activity feeds)
• Discover: the ability for users to browse content that others have submitted or rated highly, or the ability to search content

Social Computing

• Discuss: user-driven blogging, and SMS-integrated micro-blogging, along with email-integrated threaded discussion boards
• Collaborate: the ability to check-in and check-out shared documents (usually the common office formats: DOC, XLS, PDF), and keep a revision history, as well as simple and fast rich text editing (wikis)

Social Networking

• Profile (Reputation): a representation of who you are, what you know, and what you have contributed to the community
• Network: the ability to connect with other users in the system, create private working groups, and maintain different scopes of visibility into the activities of others

The funny thing about this picture is that these high-level concepts are the same ones that have been around for many years.  For example, a typical bulletin board system from the early 1990s would’ve offered these same kinds of features.  Sharing?  Sure – you could upload and download files.  Remember the ZModem protocol, anyone?  How about Discover?  Yep, search was a part of the best file sharing parts of a BBS.  How about Discussions or Collaboration?  Well of course, and there was even FIDOnet.  You could check-in documents into the file repo and keep track of versions.  Sure, it was all over a terminal window, but it was still a community platform.  What about profile (reputation) and networking?  Well, those pieces weren’t quite as solid.  Bulletin board systems had some notion of a profile, but you really couldn’t add people that you were "friends" with, and there was no notion that your profile was hidden to everyone except your friends.

MySpace is now following Facebook’s example, and has blocked access from Power.com for almost the exact same reasons.

Power.com failed to do a few key things that would’ve saved themselves from this embarrassing situation, both technical and non-technical:

• First, Power.com really should’ve engaged with the social networking sites they wanted to support as business partners first, rather than trying to go the renegade route and writing their own interfaces.
• Assuming that worked, they should’ve worked with those sites to come up with solutions for single sign-on rather than storing user credentials in their own database – storing the user credentials puts undue responsibility on Power.com to keep additional sensitive data secured.
• If the partnering approach didn’t work, and companies like Facebook ignored Power.com’s requests, Power.com could’ve used the opportunity as a way to promote the idea of the "openness of social networks" and pointed out how companies want to monopolize your social data, etc.  Instead they’re now going to need to fight the possible misconception that they are just a rogue site that shouldn’t be trusted with user credentials.

As someone that uses a lot of emerging social networking sites, I would love to have something that gives me a single dashboard to all of them.  So I would like to see the idea of Power.com succeed.  But having them be an aggregator means they must be trusted to perform that function securely.

Team Hosted combines the enterprise features of Confluence with the convenience and affordability of SaaS. It lets users:

• Edit pages using Microsoft Word
• Utilize free third-party plugins like EditGrid spreadsheets and Gliffy diagrams
• Attach and share documents, photos and video (up to 10GB)
• Start immediately. No installation or payment is required

You can get a free 30 day trial of Atlassian Confluence, which might be a good way to test drive it before you decide to buy into a monthly Enterprise hosted or on-site license for Confluence.

Getting shutdown (now or soon):

• Google Video
• Google Catalogs Search
• Dodgeball
• Jaiku (may live on w/volunteers)
• Google Mashup Editor

Rumored to be shut down soon:

• Grand Central
• Knol
• Google Base
• Google Notebook

I’d add: Google Sites to that list, too.  But CNET didn’t call it yet.

I’ve got to say: I’m not surprised to see any of these get the ax.  Google Video was replaced by YouTube.  Google Catalog Search turned useless as most companies now offer their catalogs online, and besides there’s Google Book Search still.  Dodgeball — I’d never even heard of it, unfortunately.  Jaiku was similar to Pownce (which is now gone), Twitter, FriendFeed, and many others, but not quite as powerful.  And Google Mashup Editor… Well… Mashups are just a bad idea.  I think it’s time we finally just all admit that real application integration shouldn’t happen on the glass.  It should happen behind the scenes through SOA or even REST.

As for the others: Grand Central: never heard of it.  Knol: why compete with Wikipedia or Yahoo Answers?  And Google Base: I think Craigslist works better.

It’s sad to see these projects go, since it’s a sign of the economic times.

[More details at CNET News]

Twitter

A few celebrity accounts may have gotten caught with the password phishing scheme, including Rick Sanchez of CNN, whose feed included a recent update: "i am high on crack right now and might not be coming into work today".

Other accounts include Fox News and Britney Spears as well, who also had bogus posts to their Twitter feeds.

Is it time for two factor authentication on popular social networking sites?  How about a fingerprint scan plus an RSA token key?  Anyone? Anyone? No? Bad idea? Okay, maybe you’re right.

Update #1: Twitter later announced in a separate update on their blog that the issue with the celebrity accounts being hacked (33 in all) was the act of a single individual, and not related to the phishing scam that was happening earlier.  According to the Twitter blog, the hacker took advantage of support tools that are intended to allow support engineers to help people who have forgotten their passwords.  They’ve since shut down the tools, and are taking the security breach "seriously."

Having both issues arise in such a short period of time is an unfortunate series of PR setbacks for Twitter, especially since they are still in the process of looking for a Product Manager to help them build a plan to become profitable.  As ReadWriteWeb posited earlier today, who would want to pay for a service which appears to be insecure and vulnerable to phishing attacks and backdoor account hijacking?

Update #2: CNN has additional coverage of the security issues and password phishing at Twitter, including commentary regarding Rick Sanchez’s account being compromised.  Rick’s account has been restored, and he will continue to use it as a way to communicate with viewers.

[Twitter Blog, c/o CNET News]