Thanks for commenting. I have been thinking about Facebook's terms and its approach quite a bit more since this post. I actually did a quick and dirty comparison between Google's terms of use (I see Google's terms as a good starting point) and Facebook's current terms and then also looked at the draft Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and the Principles in a post on my business blog: http://webtechlaw.com/where-you-stand-google-an...

The proposed terms of use (for lack of a better term) are very encouraging and the approach Facebook as adopted is very interesting from a lawyer's perspective. It is certainly enough to convince me that Facebook may not be the epitome of evil on the social Web. I reserve that place for LinkedIn which has terms of use that make Facebook's reviled and retracted terms look tame. I'll probably feel even better about Facebook once the current town hall process is complete and the new legal framework is in place but, as I mentioned, it is very encouraging.

I would like to see more portability possible, that is to say an opportunity to move more data out of Facebook (I'm thinking specifically about friends list and contact details) but from what I understand in the news lately, Facebook is opening up more and more of its previously closed apis. That says something too.

On the one hand, they desire to make the service more open for sharing — to make it easy for people to move their content in and out of the service. On the other, there's open source/web advocates that also want to make sure that the underlying protocols that Facebook uses are interoperable and non-proprietary. Two types of open — both meeting the definition.

Still, w/r/t to the legal bit, that's hard, since most law and terms of services are designed to protect one party over another — especially when Facebook has resources that I'm sure some people would love to have an excuse to sue to gain access to. Openness in business is also something that hasn't really been done that much before — at least in the consumer web. Facebook gets extra scrutiny because they must match their rhetoric with real behavior, but other web services are equally closed and have perhaps worse or more onerous terms of service by comparison.

This is new ground; I believe that whoever figures out this new landscape first will reap a great deal of benefits. The generation of folks working at Facebook seem young and naive enough to dispense with many of the previously “perceived” protections of the past and blaze into the future — but it's a tall order fraught with challenges and uncertainly. Indeed, time will tell, but I do think that we'll see Facebook make more overt progress in this regard in 2009 than many other of their competitors.