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Michael Belisle

April 24, 2009 6:02 PM

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I might have voted if they didn't make me add an application to do it.

5 replies

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Krobar

April 24, 2009 8:23 PM

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@Michael Belisle: Yeah, when it was first announced and linked here it seemed to require adding an app to vote, so I passed.

However, when the reminder post was done here I decided it might be worth adding it if I had to and then just removing it afterwards, it didn't pop up the thing about adding an application and let me vote. This was on the last day of the vote though, so I don't know if they were maybe hoping to have more people willing to vote or something.

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April 24, 2009 6:59 PM

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@Michael Belisle: It made you add an application? Strange... all I had to do was log in and click a link facebook provided. I voted, logged out, done. No applications for me.

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Michael Belisle

April 24, 2009 7:43 PM

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@satindevil: I could be wrong since I didn't investigate in-depth, but I believe I clicked the Consumerist link and it asked me if I wanted to authorize blah blah to access my information.

It could depend on your privacy settings, since I've completely opted out of the Facebook API. I don't even use the iPhone App anymore because it logging in with it opts you into the API.

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April 24, 2009 7:57 PM

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@Michael Belisle: Oh, ok. I voted directly through facebook, not by clicking the Consumerist link. Privacy settings may have something to do with it too.

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April 24, 2009 7:15 PM

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@satindevil: You didn't at all have to add the application to actually vote (there was a tab or link on the voting page that let you do it). You did have to install the application to enable \"vote tracking,\" which I'm guessing let you monitor the voting results as time went on.

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April 24, 2009 7:34 PM

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@supercereal: Oh, I see. I didn't bother installing that since they posted that information on the facebook voting page.

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calquist

April 24, 2009 6:18 PM

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@Michael Belisle: Yeah! No kidding! Plus once I did add it, it errored out and I couldn't vote anyway. Oh well, I don't really give a crap in the first place. If they want ownership of the pictures of my cat, they can have them.

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lifestar

April 24, 2009 6:10 PM

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Buzz Outloud was discussing about the very low key nature of this vote. I vaguely remember reading about it in a RSS feed, but didn't give it much thought until 2 days ago when the Consumerist brought it up. I think facebook is trying to save face(haha) and appear to care about what users think.

If they really did care, they should have made sure news outlets like CBS, ABC, NBC, Consumerist, CNet, Digg, etc. were gonna take the news and get it out to the public.

3 replies

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April 24, 2009 7:19 PM

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@lifestar: The point is that users apparently don't care...so there's no reason for Facebook to \"save face.\"

Plus, a website changing it's terms of service is not newsworthy (on the national news stations, anyway), as JMB pointed out. It was on Consumerist, CNet's news.com, and Digg.

Believe it or not, the general Facebook population doesn't care nearly as much as Consumerist commenters do.

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gStein_*|bringing starpipe back|*

April 25, 2009 12:30 AM

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@supercereal: right back to what TWC said, something like \"an overly vocal minority\"

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JMB

April 24, 2009 6:20 PM

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@lifestar: Look, Facebook is popular, but do you really think a vote on a website's Terms of Service is going to appear on CBS, ABC and NBC?

Maybe the other sites you mentioned, but I'd be willing to be that a lot of Facebook users wouldn't see it on those sites either.

In the end, I think the low turnout was because most people just didn't care.

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April 24, 2009 6:19 PM

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I didn't know about it until I read about it here...clearly I'm not much of a Facebook-er.

1 replies

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Kogenta

April 24, 2009 9:16 PM

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@valueofaloonie: It (the notice) didn't even show up on my facebook page until the last day of voting tbh. I saw it on here the day before.

And truth be told, when consumerist put up their first article, only 300k votes were up there. If it closed with 600k, that means 300k people voted in the final 2 days.

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April 24, 2009 6:22 PM

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While I'm sure I'm considered an \"active user\" I really don't care about their terms of service. I'm glad some people do, but whatever, facebook is stupid anyway, that 600,000 number is probably about how many people are actually active on their site, the other few million login maybe once every other day...if that.

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Anonymous

April 24, 2009 6:37 PM

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While they may have 200 million active users, how many of those have actually logged on to their accounts in the past week, month, year? Many probably signed up and only seldom logon. I did not receive any type of e-mail notification about the voting and only knew about it because of the articles I read here on Consumerist. When I next logged on to Facebook, there was a blurb at the top of the screen about the vote, but it wasn't set up as a notification, alert or via any other method that would really make an attempt at garnering user attention.

If Facebook does indeed take the user feedback despite the low voter turnout, then I may be swayed to believe they weren't intentionally making it unlikely for folks to vote. Otherwise, I'm not so sure.

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TWinter

April 24, 2009 6:45 PM

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I don't think the promotion on Facebook itself was all that great. I check Facebook several times each day and I didn't notice the banner on the vote until after I read about it on Consumerist.

2 replies

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PinkBox

April 25, 2009 1:50 PM

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@TWinter: Same. I'm on FB often, and didn't really know about it until the Consumerist pointed it out.

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larrymac thinks testing should have occurred

April 24, 2009 7:49 PM

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@TWinter: I'll second that. I'd sort of noticed the banner, but didn't realize it was about the new terms. I do recall it was pretty wordy, and when I'm on FB it's all about short attention span.

A better banner would have simply said \"VOTE ON THE NEW TERMS OF SERVICE BY CLICKING HERE\".

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batsy

April 24, 2009 6:55 PM

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If people didn't vote, it's obvious that they don't really care, so I think the new terms should be implemented because the people who DO care voted for them. If you didn't care enough to vote, you shouldn't care about whatever the outcome is. We don't throw away election results because of low turnout.

1 replies

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redkamel

April 25, 2009 4:32 AM

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@batsy: excellent reasoning!

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Betsy Burtner

April 24, 2009 7:04 PM

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how many of facebook's 200 million users log in more than once a week? or even have active accounts at all? i have several friends who have started new accounts for various reasons. one got locked out of his university linked account, another create one just to play scrabulous. i'm sure facebook wants to use the highest number possible, but requiring a percentage of active users would have been more honest here.

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April 24, 2009 7:14 PM

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@satindevil: same here. i clicked the link consumerist provided and it opened onto the poll because i'd already been logged in. i have no apps other than catbook so unless they are using catbook to run it, it took no apps for me!

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Zeniq

April 24, 2009 7:15 PM

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I tried to vote. I wasn't able to because I'm too new of a user, having only gotten an account a month ago.

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exconsumer9

April 24, 2009 7:39 PM

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Such is the problem with the silly vote. I'm a customer. I don't have time to dictate your corporate policy (even though I did vote), and shouldn't be expected to. They know what people want, and they're just dragging their feet. It's ridiculous.

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Etoiles

April 24, 2009 8:17 PM

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Let's be honest here: it was a hell of a lot of text. I sat here reading it for 15 minutes to make an informed decision, because it's a really slow week at work and I had nothing better to do.

But if I were 14?

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salvatorecondegni

April 24, 2009 8:21 PM

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People \"don't care\" but I'm willing to bet those same people are the same asshats who join all those \"F&C% THE NEW FACEBOOK\" groups.

Good for facebook [having that \"election']. This way, those who didn't vote have no reason to complain.

1 replies

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batsy

April 24, 2009 9:35 PM

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@salvatorecondegni: Precisely - they should just honor the results of the vote. Requiring a certain number of people to vote just seems redundant.

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Anonymous

April 24, 2009 8:37 PM

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This statement \"Less than a third of 1% of active users bothered to participate in this recent vote, and it was publicized on Facebook and online through various websites and blogs\" is misleading. This 1% was calculated based on the TOTAL users of Facebook (200 million) rather than the ACTIVE users number (which is unknown). I'm sure the percentage would be higher if the actual number of active users was utilized.

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maztec

April 24, 2009 8:50 PM

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I would have voted. If I had known about it. But Facebook clutters my newsfeed up with so much junk that I didn't hear about it until today, after voting had ended.

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Jim Gilliam

April 24, 2009 8:55 PM

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I think the real problem was that it was just sooo damn long and boring to read through all of it. If they had made a couple of bullet points with the main differences between each of them, they would have increased turnout dramatically. As it stood, you had to spend at least an hour to even get through and understand both documents.

This is what happens in Congress, they make these horribly long and boring bills that no one can possibly read through and understand. They just bore you to death so they can put stuff in there no one will pay attention to and still call it democracy.

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TrishB

April 24, 2009 10:16 PM

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How do they count active users? I log about once or a month. The only reason I knew about the vote was this site.

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April 24, 2009 11:53 PM

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Isn't this more suggestive that Facebook lies about their total membership numbers? (Like every other website, ever?)

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synergy

April 25, 2009 4:28 AM

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I think they should've narrowed their requirements more than \"everyone who's logged in recently.\" I think it would be better if it limited voting to people who login daily every/almost every day for the last X months. I have friends who only login once a month or something yet they'd count in the numbers they were using.

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AllenK

April 25, 2009 6:02 AM

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Well,I'm not sure how I would vote,but I decided to deactivate my account when one of my neighbors tried to friend me. This would not be a good thing to say the least. Facebook just got to be too much like being back in highschool for me! There were several other things like nearly being addicted to it that led me to \"close\" my account.

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April 25, 2009 8:24 AM

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They have tens of millions of e-mail addresses of Facebook users, and didn't bother to send an e-mail notifying people of a very important vote.

\"and it was publicized on Facebook and online through various websites and blogs\"

I saw it on Facebook in a highlighted bar at the top of the page about a day before the voting ended. Also, you didn't mention what \"websites and blogs\" where it was publicized - besides Consumerist, anyway.

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April 25, 2009 3:59 PM

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isnt the point of a vote, to tally and use it?

saying there must be x % to \"consider\" it's validity is lame.

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Anonymous

April 25, 2009 4:35 PM

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As a person who posts photos onto Facebook it was a concern to me...so yes, I voted. It was heavy reading, but there was a \"translated\" version that made it easier.

Now.....if you are interested in getting your teeth into a different aspect of Facebook - how about the lack of customer service. Facebook has been disabling accounts all over for supposed spamming - by people who belong to photo groups on FB and so type the word VOTE continuously as required.
April 14th I lost my account for doing this...20 emails later, to various addresses supposedly there to help (including the one they provided) and not ONE response...and still the account is disabled as of today.
Lost friends, lost photos, lost links, lost that social network they are so proud of and they can't even be bothered to reply.

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Anonymous

April 25, 2009 5:44 PM

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What really scares me is how many people blindly chose \"Yes\" in the vote, going with the phrasing of how \"Facebook went to the community for advice\" and other such bull. If you really do read through it, the old terms from last year gives Facebook less control of your intellectual property, as opposed to this \"collaboration.\" Notice that Facebook doesn't have to specify which parts they took from the community, if any.

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April 26, 2009 1:00 PM

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I'm a facebook user and I seriously didn't even know about this. I'm sure they promoted it somewhere within all those useless/spam notifications that I try to weed through at every login.

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Anonymous

April 27, 2009 4:26 PM

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My biggest issue with this whole thing was that it wasn't well publicized. I am on facebook almost everyday. Yet there was no warning, and no notice that this was happening. I did finally receive an invitation to vote on the last day, after voting the day before.

I would leave Facebook if it didn't have a monopoly and my social life

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April 27, 2009 5:49 PM

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I'd be willing to bet that a lot of people who originally objected to the new T&S didn't vote because the \"minimum threshold\" part wasn't publicized. If you're certain 90% of people are going to vote a certain way, is *your* vote really that important?

(Yeah, it's lazy, but that's life. And yeah, I'll admit to thinking along these lines before I read about the 30% minimum here on Consumerist. I voted, and made my husband do it too.)

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