Facebook may ban users from selling their status updates or using their profiles for commercial gain as part of the company's proposed new Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. Users have a week to give feedback on it before the polciy becomes official.
It's a move that would separate the social networking site from Twitter, which hasn't openly interfered with third-party apps like IZEA's Sponsored Tweets. That program, which launched today, lets people with large Twitter accounts promote products and services for cash through tweets. Facebook understandably doesn't want to cloud its real-time stream of updates with marketing messages or make the user experience poorer with spam. (Personally, I don't know why you would risk losing followers or Facebook friends to shill for a small amount of money.)
The proposed rights agreement says:
You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain (such as selling your status update to an advertiser).
There are a few other changes. The company wants to ban pyramid schemes and denial-of-service attacks, like the one that last week against an activist Georgian blogger that slowed service. Facebook also makes the risks associated with sharing content on the "Everyone" setting a lot more explicit:
When you publish content or information using the “everyone” setting, it means that everyone, including people off of Facebook, will have access to that information and we may not have control over what they do with it.
Facebook also makes it clear that they have the right to take back any usernames that interfere with company trademarks.
If you select a username for your account we reserve the right to remove or reclaim it if we believe appropriate (such as when a trademark owner complains about a username that does not closely relate to a user’s actual name).