I’m cross-posting my comment on Dare Obasanjo’s blog. It’s somewhat repetitive, but it says nicely what I think. What the heck, bits are cheap – I’ll keep it around.
But first, here’s an odd thing – I’m a little nervous whenever I post on the blog/website of a highly respected person.
Half of it is that it’s highly visible. As a blogger, the greatest thing in the world is when you post something insightful in a high traffic place, and that people read it and say – “What an interesting thought! I think I’ll follow the link attached to his name and see what else he has to say.” [Hi Dare! 
] This is called “joining the conversation,” but when it happens in a rigid meritocracy (such as the web), there are risks.
The Happy Moron has, for every person, *one* first impression. I’d estimate that 90+% of visitors will come only once. They’ll glance at the front page, and unless it blows them away… they’ll never come back. (Actually, the vast majority of blog and website traffic comes not from links but from Google hits on specific articles – and from there people may decide to visit, or not to visit, the main page) If I’m baiting a hook for readership that I care about, I want to make sure my house is tidy before I bring the guests in.
Tied to the visibility is that if I say something stupid, I’ve done so in a highly visible place. Oops.
The other half is that if you post rubbish in a place where smart, influential people visit, you will drive them away. Watch Giles Bowkett rant. If I want to observe world-class engineers and software people, I need, to some degree, to be a fly on the wall. It takes effort to track smart people to their lairs and eavesdrop. It’s easy to find the popular places that everybody links to. It’s much harder to filter through the long tail and find the quiet places where people hold reasoned, polite, informed conversations.
For people who just like to talk about stuff, being consumed by their own popularity is a burden – a curse, not a blessing.
Anyway, the comment:
“For me, the most interesting wrinkle is that people’s expectations of ownership vary greatly according to the kind of content discussed – exactly as Andrew describes.
Is papering over a complex reality with a simple, blanket license really the answer? For every complex problem, there is a simple solution, and it is wrong. Copy-on-post for Messages? Sure! Don’t do it with my Notes or photos.
I understand Mark’s desire to run his platform and not get sued, but Mark… Do you really need the right to sub-license my Notes and pictures? The right to publicly perform the contents of my message?
Even on a web where I can’t guarantee deletion of anything, the principle of least privilege applies.
I would be comforted, however, if instead of simply claiming “We need these privileges because it’s complicated,” Facebook would come up with a TOS that actually reflected that and gave me some confidence that they cared about my privacy.
The reality is that Facebook will probably thrive with any TOS, merely due to public apathy.”