Facebook TOS Vote To End Today

People who have been procrastinating should know that they’re almost out of time. Later today, the Facebook governance vote will end, and either the new or the old terms of service will become pretty well permanent.

Would-be voters need to sign into Facebook and make a choice before 11:59 AM California time. An independent auditor will take over at that point to tally things up.

Facebook’s own statistics suggest that around 589,000 people have voiced their opinions so far. Those individuals support the proposed, user-sourced documents by an almost overwhelming margin, 74.48 percent to 25.52 percent.

However, since Facebook has around 200 million active users (people who have logged in sometime during the last month), and the rules of the vote state that 30 percent of them need to participate in order for the results to count, it remains to be seen whether this’ll amount to anything. There’s a big gap between 600,000 and 60 million.

On a side note, Facebook seems to be certain seeking users’ opinions concerning one other matter, as well. Nick O’Neill writes, "[S]ome users are being asked if they are willing to pay for vanity URLs."

There are 7 Comments. Add Yours.

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curtfranklin
April 26, 2009 at 3:59 pm

Millions of Facebook users recently voted overwhelmingly (about 98%) to return the features Facebook took away in its latest redesign. In addition, millions of users created and joined groups demanding the return of those features. Not only did Facebook ignore that vote and those groups (and all the national negative publicity they generated), they never even responded to them. So of course Facebook users have no interest in giving Facebook more input to be ignored.

It’s obvious to me that my friends have stopped using Facebook as much since the redesign. Following so close after the TOS debacle, who can blame them? We’re all just waiting for someone to come up with a competing social networking site that isn’t run by a moron like Mark Zuckerburg.

Curt

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Official Safety and Security
April 26, 2009 at 1:12 pm

I’m mainly on FaceBook to socially market my safety and security web site and raise awareness for its products so I’m on there just about every day and nothing has popped up asking for my opinion or prompting me to vote.

If FaceBook is really serious about making a change based on their active users, they need to give this the same attention as the original TOS. Every user was made to look at the TOS and agree with them before they could have an account.

If the original TOS are going to be changed, all of the active users should be prompted when they log in that their opinion or vote is needed before they can proceed.

This would go a long way to showing users how important we are to the success and future of FaceBook.

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Guest
April 23, 2009 at 1:01 pm

I don’t doubt that people chose not to vote. Voting requires loading a facebook application and frankly I’d rather not take that risk. Their track record on the safety of their applications has been sketchy so far.

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  Guest
  April 23, 2009 at 3:40 pm
  
  Well I didn’t choose not to vote, I only found out about it about an hour ago. How clever of Facebook not to notify members that they were taking a vote on this.
  
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zigojacko
April 23, 2009 at 12:18 pm

I sign into Facebook everyday and I have not even once been alerted to this poll or noticed/seen a link to it anywhere on the site. No wonder only half a million have voted, I doubt anyone else has even been pointed towards it or knows it exists.

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  Doug Caverly
  April 23, 2009 at 12:27 pm
  
  Here you go: http://apps.facebook.com/fbsitevote/contests/208
  
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  David K
  April 23, 2009 at 1:08 pm
  
  I agree I never saw the pole and if it hadn’t been for a friend telling me I wouldn’t have voted on it.