Instead of giving Vanity URLs away for free, like it did last weekend, Facebook originally planned to auction them off to the highest bidder.
Facebook’s first idea was to auction them off in a standard “ascending” auction, where the URL and user name would have gone to highest bidder at the highest bid. The problem there was Facebook would have had to close millions of real-time auctions in a very short period of time, creating a tremendous load on its servers. Facebook also worried about giving wealthier users advantages over poorer ones.
Facebook is one of the largest social networking sites operating on the Internet. Therefore, without a doubt, you can assume that it contains information worth thousands of terabytes. Almost all this information is user fed data. But there are fundamental questions about the information uploaded by the users and its future. Who really owns the information in your user account such as writings and photos? Can anyone else access or use your content?
When Facebook was first introduced to the world of social networking, Facebook Terms of Service (TOS) said that all the content uploaded by the users will remain as a property of users. Once the users delete the content or close the account, content will be gone forever. It was a fair policy and no complaints were logged against it. Taking a further step in Terms of Service, Facebook then introduced the newer version of Terms of Service which simply said, ‘We own all your content, and we can do almost anything with it, forever’.
With the new TOS, Facebook owned your content such as wall messages, photos, videos etc. and Facebook could use them for purposed defined by them. Although you delete these contents from your account, Facebook can keep them in their servers forever and use them in the future.
Due to the controversy and the outrage made by the Facebook users, Facebook later rolled back their TOS to be more user friendly. Facebook even created ‘Facebook TOS Feedback Group’ for clarifying the issues regarding the TOS.
