The results of the Facebook Site Governance Vote have been audited and are official. Of the 665,654 votes, 74.37% supported the revised documents.
Supporters of the revised documents include the co-founders of "the first and largest Facebook group against the previous change to the terms" and Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
Comments to the blog show that many users were either unaware of the vote or found out with too little time to adequately prepare themselves for the vote. As I reported earlier this week, too few news outlets and individuals helped spread positive messages urging readers to vote. Facebook will be holding future votes and I encourage you to participate.
One way in which Facebook can improve voter participation would be to more heavily publicize the vote in advance; little was done to do so for this vote besides a small box on the home page.
In response to the low turnout, Facebook general counsel Ted Ullyot says that the site is considering "lowering the 30-percent threshold" for a binding vote. Despite the small response, the vote has been accepted and Facebook will adopt the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and Principles.
UPDATE on Friday, April 24: The auditors have just confirmed the official vote results. There were 665,654 votes cast and users supported the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and Principles by an overwhelming margin — 74.37 percent. We will adopt these documents and post them to Facebook and the Site Governance Page in the coming weeks.
I've been hiding my addictions to Facebook, AIM, and MySpace for years and now, thanks to Spreadtweet, I can cover up my new-found tweeting obsession.
Spreadtweet is a Twitter client cleverly disguised as an Excel spreadsheet. Use it in meetings, use it at work, use it in class... Use it when your girlfriend tells you that you tweet to much. Heck, I've taken a liking to it just because it's neat, clean, and gives me a bunch of tweets in a convenient-to-read format.
Spreadtweet runs on the Adobe AIR framework, so it's compatible with Macs and PCs. In fact, you can pick your version of Excel (Office 2003, Office 2007, or Office for OSX). You get all the bells and whistles of an actual Excel spreadsheet, but none of the buttons work. Instead, your controls are disguised as column headers, giving you access to replies, direct messages, etc.
One itty bitty problem, though. The Windows Office 2007 version gives me an Office OSX dock icon. I guess it wasn't quite designed for Windows 7.
Yawn... If you can't tell, I've been irritated with Facebook lately. Not only are they trying to convert me to Christianity, they're trying to lull me into a false sense of security about their terms of service.
At least I don't deal with Facebook drama and, thanks to Alice and Timmy, I've got a good idea on how to avoid it!
Since Facebook announced their Facebook Site Governance campaign, global privacy watchdog Privacy International has taken an interest in the initiative—and they're calling "B.S."
Privacy International has released an article detailing the campaign and comparing it to some of the lackluster "votes" Facebook has had in the past. The results of the Site Governance vote are only valid if 30% of the active Facebook "population" participates (which is higher than the 25% cited earlier this year). Privacy International's Director, Simon Davies claims that Facebook is fully aware that they will never achieve a 30% response, considering that recent votes on issues such as site design only brought in a fifteen to twenty percent response rate.
As of the time of this posting, only 283,109 of the approximately 45 million required have voted. Voting closes on April 23.
While Privacy International makes a very compelling argument that Facebook is pulling a fast one on us, there is one very important objection I have to the statement. Rather than whine about the issue, why not encourage Facebook's members to vote? Not only have I read the new documents, I've voted and so should you. Click here to log in and vote.
As part of an effort to make Facebook a more democratic community, their Site Governance Vote is now underway. The new documents, the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and Facebook Principles, will replace the site's current terms of use, which were last updated nearly seven months ago.
In Facebook's words:
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Vote on which documents you think are best to govern the site using the Facebook Site Governance application. Voting begins on April 16 at 12:01pm PDT and ends on April 23 at 11:59am PDT.
If you signed up for a Facebook after February 26, you have to wait until the next voting opportunity to join in.
I think this is an important step in the evolution of social media and social networking sites. Facebook has over 200 million users. To put that in perspective, only four countries in the world have more than 200 million users residents. Naturally, democratic governance is necessary, especially when you have PR nightmares like these.
Here's an old post from Freshome that has some pretty creative bookshelf ideas. Some are admittedly more creative than others, but I could totally see myself with the "Magnetique" shelf in my study. Check out more at the link below!
Computer Science students beware! In today's society, "typing command prompts" just might get your possessions confiscated.
Let's set the scene. At Boston College, an email was sent to an email list alleging that a student at the University was gay. Officials promptly launched an investigation in which computer science student Riccardo Calixte became a suspect. The grounds for such accusations, it seems, were that he fixes laptops and uses Linux... Lame.
As a result, the investigating officer filed a search warrant application to seize the student's computer, flash drives, and any other media in his possession. The warrant was granted and now the student's personal property has been seized and the student himself has been suspended from his job pending the investigation.
Honestly, how can simply using "command prompts" be sufficient to warrant search and seizure? Aren't citizens protected from such heinous abuses of our rights? Granted, the guy may have sent the email, but I highly doubt he did and any evidence gleaned from this investigation would likely be immediately thrown out if the matter were to go to court.
I find it deplorable that gross misunderstandings can yield such costly outcomes when it comes to errors in judgment.
When a drug dog alerted on a shipping box for a new TV set, officers must have assumed that the pooch was just interested in watching Wishbone reruns. Upon closer inspection, however, they uncovered $50,000 worth of bona fide marijuana packed inside the TV set.
No word whether the TV set, which was wrapped in cellophane and Tabasco sauce, is still functional or whether it's just hungry.
What clowns... This is disgusting—not the fact that they're sticking customers' food in their noses or farting on salami, but the fact that they are stupid enough to upload this to YouTube.
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Look at the book I'm reading. Tori, uhh, Stori telling. Yeah, that's it.
Word on the streets is that they've already been fired. Digg it anyway and pass it on.
This is exactly why I dreamed of working for Google all through high school (and most of college). The guys in Google's Santa Monica office got together and bought a huge frickin' Fresnel ("freh-NELL") lens for the sole purpose of roasting things with the sun's death rays energy.
Some of the cooler things they've roasted with the death beam (which is the same type of lens used in overhead projectors and lighthouses) include wood, pennies, gummy bears, yadda yadda... Oh, and they cooked bacon and eggs with the sucker. Nice.
You can get an overview of the shenanigins over at the Official Google Blog or you can see every single photo of the fun in painstaking detail at one of the team members' LiveJournal blogs.
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