While the company’s design doesn’t seem to have changed a whole lot, its services and capabilities sure have. Created by Stanford PhD students Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google officially launched Sept. 4, 1998. The interface was so simple because the founders didn’t know HTML and were looking for a quick design.
MySpace’s usual homepage was replaced this evening with a puzzling message, leading many (including this reporter) to initially believe the site may have been hacked. That apparently was not the case.
Visitors to the social network were greeted by a largely blank page topped with the browser title bar that read “All is wrong ” where the MySpace name would normally appear. In the upper left of the normally vibrant page was the message: “We messed up our code so bad that even puppies and kittens may be in danger. Please turn back …now.” It was followed up with the message, “* Have your pet spayed or neutered” in the lower right.
The specifics on who owns what in social media has always been a little blurry, even when an attempt at clarification is provided.
For example, while Twitter is adamant that “they are your tweets and they belong to you”, they also state explicitly in their terms of service that when you sign up to the network you grant Twitter a “worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license” which allows them to “use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute” those tweets in any way they see fit. Moreover, you also give permission that they can make those tweets “available to other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter for the syndication, broadcast, distribution or publication of such Content on other media and services.”
So, yeah, technically, while those tweets might belong to you, inasmuch as you can, uh, delete them anytime you like, that’s about the extent of your ownership. Twitter can do this and pretty much everything else. And more importantly, they’re making an income off of your content, too. As are Facebook and all the other giant social portals.
So remind us again exactly what it is that we ‘own’?
This infographic from MyCube, a new social exchange that promises to let you “own, control and monetize your digital life”, collates important stats and data from the past year that addresses just how valuable user-generated content has become across all the major social networks.
Collectively, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter pulled in an estimated 3.38 billion in estimated revenues in 2010 alone, basically on your dime. Or at least your time. After all, without the content that each and all of us provide on a daily basis, these platforms would have absolutely no value. None. Nada. Zilch. And that’s the bottom line.
So, here’s the big question of the day: aren’t we all entitled to a share?
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