From CNN.com:

"Under fire from tens of thousands of users, the social networking site Facebook said early Wednesday it is reverting to its old policy on user information -- for now."

Just as with the Motrin Moms, the Facebook TOS debacle illustrates how powerful social media can be.

Is is okay if Facebook takes those photos of your kids that you posted on your Facebook accounts and sells them to an advertising agency?  Or makes money by selling them through a stock photo businesses?  How about those photos of your last vacation?  Okay if FB sells those to a travel marketer?

For those of you who syndicate your blog post into Facebook as notes, is it okay if Facebooks claims copyrights on those?

Well, if you have any problem with any of these ideas, take a look at Facebooks recently updated Terms of Service ("TOS").  You might be surprised to find that, according to the new TOS, anything you upload or post to your Facebook account belongs to Facebook--forever.  Facebook claims the right to sell or sub-license your content (uh, I mean its content that used to be your content until you put it on Facebook) for any purpose, including commercial gain, forever.

The old TOS used to state that when you closed your account, any rights claimed by Facebook to your content would expire.  Not any more.

Compare the new Facebook TOS with that of Google's Picasa service:

"9.4 Other than the limited license set forth in Section 11, Google acknowledges and agrees that it obtains no right, title or interest from you (or your licensors) under these Terms in or to any Content that you submit, post, transmit or display on, or through, the Services, including any intellectual property rights which subsist in that Content (whether those rights happen to be registered or not, and wherever in the world those rights may exist). Unless you have agreed otherwise in writing with Google, you agree that you are responsible for protecting and enforcing those rights and that Google has no obligation to do so on your behalf."

Polar opposites.  Google is being very reasonable.  Facebook is being very unreasonable.

Bottom line, if you care about what happens to your photos or other content, don't post them to Facebook.

Every once in a while, if you're lucky, you discover someone—perhaps an artist, an author, poet, musician, philosopher, or just a friend—who really speaks to you, or for you.  Someone who makes you think, "Exactly right!"  Or just someone who makes you think.  And when you do, you feel you're life is a little bit richer.

I have been lucky that way, many times.  And recently I felt that way again when I discovered (via a recent interview on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast) the enlightened, intelligent, and enormously talented Australian musician, songwriter, poet, and comedian, Tim Minchin.

Tim's podcast interview opened with a recording of the brief (but not briefly titled), If You Open Your Mind Too Much, Your Brain Will Fall Out.  My reaction was, "Wow, who is this guy?  He gets it and he's good."  After the podcast I spent some time on timminchin.com and on You Tube perusing his various works and found that If You Open Your Mind… is my second favorite work, right behind Storm.

Storm is a 9-minute poem set to musical accompaniment that tells the story of a dinner party where Tim and his wife are invited to the home of another couple, close friends with whom they have dined and partied many times.  But there is a fifth guest, a beautiful young woman named, Storm, who does not share Tim's world view.  The conversation is priceless.

By being so darn entertaining, Tim can fill a theater—physical or virtual—with folks that just want a great show.  And they'll get one.  But they'll also get, if only by osmosis, something else.  They'll get a little injection of reality, of critical thinking, that may, if we are all lucky, ever so slightly raise their immunity to memes of dogmatic blindness.

And that's a good thing, for everyone.  The sooner everyone understands that this life we all share is… well, just what it is and it is fantastic and wonderful and should not be wasted believing fairy tales, the better off we all will be.  We're the lucky ones.  We have all this.  Just this.