Here’s an excerpt of the changed terms:

. . . by submitting Content to Twitpic, you hereby grant Twitpic a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content in connection with the Service and Twitpic’s (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels.

Yes, this means exactly what you think it means – your images now belong to Twitpic, and they can do pretty much anything they want with them.

Even scarier – if you delete an image you’ve uploaded, they may still be able to retain a license to use it as they see fit:

The above licenses granted by you in media Content you submit to the Service terminate within a commercially reasonable time after you remove or delete your media from the Service provided that any sub-license by Twitpic to use, reproduce or distribute the Content prior to such termination may be perpetual and irrevocable.

Now, I am not a lawyer, but as far as I can tell, the new licensing terms apply only to images uploaded on or after May 4, 2011. If you’ve uploaded content since then, you may want to remove it.

As expected, Twitpic received a backlash of angry sentiment, and tried to address it on their blog – but most of the original legalese still stands – they continue to retain the right to sublicense or transfer their license to any other third party.

If you’re looking to find the reason behind these changes, just follow the money trail. This article outlines a deal between Twitpic and news agency World Entertainment News Network (WENN) concerning the licensing of celebrity photos posted to Twitpic. It’s no stretch to think that this deal could expand to include Twitpics of major news events or first-hand accounts, and similar agreements with other media outlets.

So now what? The beauty of Twitpic was that it integrated so well with many popular Twitter clients. A few people are suggesting Posterous as an alternative, as they have a less far reaching licensing agreement which only allows them to use your image for promoting Posterous itself, with no clause to sublicense your image for another use.

]]> http://www.jdross.com/2011/05/11/twitpic-tos-change/feed/ 2 http://www.jdross.com/2011/04/01/aprilfools/ http://www.jdross.com/2011/04/01/aprilfools/#comments Fri, 01 Apr 2011 14:06:28 +0000 J.D. http://www.jdross.com/?p=193 Ah, April 1st – the day that higher-ed loves to turn institutional homepages into a creative canvas of jokes and tricks. Here’s what I’ve found so far this year – I’ll try to keep this list updated throughout the day!

We’re now entering our third admission cycle with fraudulent Facebook groups dedicated to shilling for a business at the expense of the student experience.

As many colleges and universities set up their “Class of 2015″ pages and groups for soon-to-be-admitted freshman, over 150 fake groups are already out there, created by Florida-based roommate matching service RoomSurf.com.

This year is a little different, however, and a whole lot more deceptive.  Last year, the service established groups with names such as “URoomSurf Group for XXXX College Class of 2014,” and used RoomSurf’s logo as the group graphic. This year, RoomSurf has lifted the logos and wordmarks of colleges and universities and used them to populate the group graphic – making the group appear as if it were established and/or sanctioned by the school.

Colleges and Universities that create their own “Class of 20xx” groups and pages usually do so to help foster discussions and relationships between admitted students, and give them a direct line to the institution if they have questions or concerns – many of these groups are moderated by, or at least reviewed by, current students and/or admission office staffers. That same level of engagement and involvement won’t happen on the RoomSurf initiated groups.

If you work in higher education and find that RoomSurf has usurped your logo or school picture and has created a group on behalf of your institution, here are a few things you can do to help mitigate the damage:

1) Work to direct your prospective and admitted students directly into YOUR group. E-mails, links from the Admission page to the correct group, and a notice in the acceptance letter with a customized URL are all easy ways to make this happen.

2) Since RoomSurf grabbed your logo or picture without your permission, you can click “Report Group” in the lower left-hand corner of the page and report the group to Facebook as “Spam/Scam.”  You should also report the theft of your image by filing a DMCA Notice of Copyright Infringement with Facebook.  Make sure you include the link to the fraudulent group on the DMCA form to ensure Facebook can find the issue.  There is no guarantee that Facebook will take action, but I can speak from experience in that I was able to have Facebook remove a bogus (although non-RoomSurf-related) group for our college last year.

3) If the RoomSurf-created group has a number of misdirected students already joined, you can join the group as well and post a message to the wall explaining the issue and pointing them to the official group.

More information and background on this issue:

Class of 2015 Groups – News Articles:

• A Facebook ‘Welcome’ That May Not Be
• Colleges Caution Against “Welcome Class of 2015″ Facebook Groups
• Beware of bogus university welcome groups on Facebook
• Facebook Freshmen, Watch Out For Roomsurf
• Company Sets Up Unauthorized College Facebook Groups
• ‘Welcome’ Groups for College Freshmen on Facebook Revealed as Subtle Marketing Scheme
• Students: Be cautious of Facebook welcome pages

Class of 2015 Groups – Blogs:

• Facebook, Trust and RoomSurf.com – Georgy Cohen
• Coming together: Colleges unite to fight Facebook fraud – Tim Nekritz
• Dealing with Fake Facebook Groups – Michael Fienen
• Facebookgate all over again? – Andrew Careaga
• Facebook Class of 2015 Groups: Deja Vu All Over Again – Lori Packer
• Is FacebookGate ‘Troll Marketing’? – Lougan Bishop

Class of 2015 Groups – Discussions:

• Thread on College Confidential

Previous “Facebookgate” issues:

• Facebookgate, Class of 2013
• Facebookgate, Class of 2014

In particular, I believe these few sentences by Georgy truly captured our discussion:

“A brand needs good stories like a website needs good usability. Both guide our audiences toward desired ends, supporting core objectives. And how do you craft an effective story? By knowing your audience. And in higher ed, we live and breathe with our audience every day. That is not easy to replicate externally. It’s part institutional knowledge, but also part investment in the institution and connection to its mission.”

As communications professionals, we need to know and understand our various audiences, and we need to be able to craft stories to communicate the value of an education at our institutions. Only by being committed to the mission, and understanding the goals of our respective institutions, can we do this with any degree of success.

Enough from me – go read Georgy’s great post.

The video I love is The Machine is Us/ing Us by Michael Wesch, professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University. And if I had to pick a second video, it would be Information R/evolution also by Wesch.

It’s over three years old at this point, but The Machine is Us/ing Us does an excellent job of showing the foundation of our digitally connected world, and where it will take us in the future.

I’ve incorporated this video, in whole and in parts, into a number of presentations I’ve given over the years, and it has always helped my audience “get it” with it comes to Web 2.0 and beyond.

Despite being a little fast, and somewhat technical at the outset, my (mostly non-technical) audiences always seemed to understand the message, and it served as a way to initiate discussions about where we wanted to go after Web 2.0.

Wesch continued to build on the themes from this video with future works. Information R/evolution is another one of his videos that also takes the viewer from old methods to new paradigms, and shows the need for examining how we will store and manage information (content) in the future.

Both videos are below:

The Machine is Us/ing Us

Information R/evolution

While the University did an excellent job of updating their main home page and emergency web site, they left one of their most important channels completely dark – their institutional Facebook page with a reach of over 186,000 followers had absolutely no mention of the incident.  As of early this morning, they still have not addressed the issue in that forum.

This is not to say that the University neglected their duty to the community during this crisis – in fact, from all of the press, Tweets, and blogs I’ve read, it seems as if the on-campus alerts, text messages, sirens and e-mails did a thorough job of communicating the incident, and directing community members to shelter in place.

In this age of instant social media communication, it was strange to see UT’s official Facebook page not addressing the issue. With Fan postings to the wall turned off, there was no way for people to share information with each other.  The only UT Facebook presence that kept followers updated was that of the UT Police Department – which had a fraction of the fan following that the main institutional Facebook page had.  About 1 hour into the campus lockdown, the UT Police department page had just under 900 visitors – this morning, it has close to 10,000.  Certainly, as word got out and users shared the link, the UTPD page grew, but it didn’t have a large number of followers initially.

Now I understand that throwing a Facebook page into the mix adds another place you have to turn to and update while you’re in crisis mode, and that leaving the fan wall posting ability turned on makes it easy for rumors and false information to spread, but I still believe that the official institutional Facebook page needs to be managed and updated in a time of crisis.

The time to work your social media outlets into your crisis plan isn’t in the middle of a crisis – it’s now.  You need to decide who will be responsible for making the updates, what they post, who authorizes them to post, and how comments and fan posts are dealt with. If you don’t have control over your Facebook and Twitter presences, you need to find a way to get it – if the admissions office or the development office controls your most highly followed social accounts, the communications, media, or PR office needs to be able to provide updates as well.  Figure this out now, so you’re not chasing down someone to post an update in the middle of a disaster.

If your campus has an emergency/disaster drill, work with the organizers to see that social media is covered in the communications plan. When my institution ran a drill this summer, one of my responsibilities was to monitor social media (our presences as well as general searches) for mentions, and to keep our primary Facebook and Twitter accounts updated with the most recent instructions and information.

Whoever was behind the UT Police Department’s Facebook updates was doing a great job – but they were doing it on the wrong page. I agree with Jessica Krywosa’s post yesterday on .eduguru – the updates were authentic and provided important instructions and information, I just think they should have also channeled them through the official Facebook page to reach a wider audience.

In addition to these wrapup posts, over the next several days I will also be writing a series of posts reviewing new applications and services that I had a chance to demo at the summit.

It’s not a conference, it’s an unconference

The Real-Time Web Summit was held in an “unconference” format – that is, the agenda and the direction was not set ahead of time by ReadWriteWeb, but rather by the conference participants themselves.

After the keynote address, Myths, Realities and the Future of the Real-Time Web by Marshall Kirkpatrick, and a talk by Suzanne Livingston from IBM, pieces of paper and markers were set out on the floor in front of the group (we were all seated in a large oval).  People who were interested in convening a session would take a piece of paper, write their idea and name on it, and announce their session to the room. Below is an example of a session description posted on the grid.

Similar sessions were merged, and the pieces of paper were then affixed to a large schedule grid in the adjoining room.  Breakout rooms had been created with pipe and drape, which allowed for a dozen or so sessions to run at the same time.  The sessions were to take place under the Principles of Open Space (see below).

Session 1 -  Truth detection and healing bad realtime data on the web

This session was pitched and moderated by Mike Rose from TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

The focus was on the fact that stories that go viral aren’t always true, and how can/should the real-time web react and correct these false tales?  For example, stories and tweets that go around claiming a the death or arrest of a celebrity, etc.

We talked about the need for some kind of reputation-checking system, a meter of trustworthyness for posts and/or people.  Detecting false stories becomes even more difficult when popular hyper-influencers chime in – at that point, refuting a story becomes like swimming upstream unless another strong influencer comes in.

Someone likened this hyper-influencer issue to the old New Yorker cartoon about no one on the Internet knowing you’re a dog – if 6 million people THINK you’re a dog, then essentially, you ARE a dog.

Another important point that came up, and one that I found repeated at two other sessions later in the day, was about teaching digital literacy to kids.  How can we educate them and condition them NOT to instantly believe everything they see tweeted and Facebooked online? Is this something that should be tied together with a more broad educational program about reputation management on social media sites?

Some other points and questions raised from this session:

• Can a self healing solution be crafted – like the comments in BitTorrent?
• The realtime spread of the problem is faster than the system can deal with it.
• There is no online meritocracy for general information.
• Is there a way to add reputation levels to the Twitter metadata?
• Should we be tracking where things originate using metadata?
• People love to re-tweet something that makes them look smarter than the media – but it’s often bogus info.
• Could we flag people with a positive grade (not necessarily a negative one) for sharing truthful information?
• Do brands need to find advocates across timezones to force-influence topics and act as spotters if something incorrect comes up?
• How do you measure the overall cost of the damage of false information?

More to come in Part 2 of my wrapup, including Content Curation in the Real-Time Web, Social Media Monitoring, and Real-Time Location Sharing.

Also: Read “Dispatches From the Real-Time Web” – wrapup notes from Georgy Cohen, my counterpart at Tufts University.

Scenios is a web-based digital asset management application that allows you to upload, share, tag and export video clips collaboratively with your team.

As soon as the demo began, I immediately saw the value this could have in my office, where we often use video clips from more than one student videographer, and reviewing and producing the piece can be timeconsuming and confusing.

Scenios streamlines these issues by providing one place to pull the content together and interact with it.  Instead of having video clips on two different student’s computers, in different formats, etc., all clips could be uploaded to Scenios.

Once the clips are uploaded, the producer can review them and tag different areas for reference and editing.  Tags can apply to an entire clip, or can be applied to only a portion of the clip. For example, the producer could tag the clip from 1:35 to 1:42 and identify it to be cut.  Video editors can then log in, review the tags and annotations, download the clips to their editing software, and do their work there.

Once the video piece is finalized, it can be uploaded back into Scenios, if you want, and published to Vimeo. Other video hosting platforms will be supported soon.  The benefit of putting back into Scenios, rather than just publishing it on your own, is that you can tag it for future reference.  The tagging capability is the strength here – it makes Scenios a robust, yet simple, digital asset management program.

Scenios is free, and the free account allows you one project with up to three collaborators and 2GB of file storage.  Paid accounts start at $79 per month. Scenios uses Amazon’s S3 cloud storage to host your video files.

More info, or try it out: scenios.com

Screenshot of editing/tagging funcion:

I have not, yet, had time to review all the press and new controls fully, but here is the rundown:

Facebook has established one control mechanism to set who can see the content you post on the site.  This does NOT replace the granular controls that currently exist, you can still get at them and control your account that way if you desire.  The new controls are meant to simplify the granular process.  With this, it should be easier to set who can see all your content with one fell swoop.

In addition, Facebook is no longer requiring some information to be public. You will now be able to decide who can see your friends list and pages list.

As far as games, third-party sites, and instant personalization goes (these are the areas where Facebook took the most heat for privacy issues), you can now switch off instant personalization with one click.  That means that even if some of your data is open to everyone, you can still block it from being used for instant personalization.  Facebook has also added a kill switch for games and applications.

The explanation for all of these new privacy changes can be found on Facebook’s site on a page called Controlling How You Share.

It is not clear when these new privacy controls will roll out for everyone, in Mark Zuckerberg’s blog post today, he says, “We’ll be rolling out these changes to all of you over the next few weeks.”