Facebook F8: All Your Widgets Are Belong To Us

Last week Facebook unveiled its new development platform to open the site up to outside widget makers. Already widgets from iLike and others have seen widespread adoption, but in the rush to commend Facebook on its bid to overtake MySpace as the premier social network site the actual terms of use for the Facebook platform have largely been overlooked.

While I am among those who would love to see Facebook succeed and MySpace go the way of Prodigy and other once mighty services, I think it's worth pointing out that the Facebook terms of service are less than optimal from an outside developer's standpoint.

A recent post on Sam Sethi's Vecosys blog points out some of the sticky points in the Facebook TOS.

1. Facebook can limit you or terminate you at any time at their sole discretion (Section A.3)
2. Facebook reserve the right to impose fees at time and in any manner (Section 3)
3. Facebook can copy and distribute your Application, and analyze the content in order to target advertising (Section 4)
4. Facebook may create similar applications to yours, with no obligation to you (Section 4)
5. You can't use any name or domain name address containing ‘facebook', even at the third level, e.g. “facebook.xxx.com” (Section 6. C)
6. Be careful what ID you use for your developer account - IDs can't be transferred or sold on, but nor do there seem to be corporate IDs. (Section 7)
7. Facebook can change the Terms and Conditions at any time, your only recourse if you don't like this is to STOP USING THE SERVICE

Will Facebook impose a ‘tollbooth' or tax on successful widgets? Sure looks like they want to. Will they be building their own competitive versions? Sure looks like they want to. Can they cut you off from the platform at any time? Sure looks like they can. Can they change the ground on which you operate? Sure looks like they can. Do you have a hard and fast relationship with this platform, making it safe to build a 20 million user widget based company on? I don't think so.

While I agree with Sethi that some of these clauses are somewhat alarming from an outsider developer's point of view, I don't think there's necessarily any cause for alarm. On some level Facebook is entering totally uncharted waters and is, understandably I think, covering their butts a bit.

As Chris Messina points out in the comments on Sethi's post, “I don't think anything in those terms suggests that Facebook wants to build tollroads; nor that they will necessarily build competitive products if yours ends up being successful.”

Of course they could do both of those things, should the fancy strike them and that alone may put off some developers.

Be sure to check out the full terms of service for the new Facebook F8 platform.