User terms at major social network sites like Facebook and Twitter are highly questionable, according to a survey by the Norwegian Consumer Council.

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Please raise your hand if you took the time to read all 11 pages of Facebook’s user terms!

No? You didn’t read them? How irresponsible of you!

What about the 14 pages from LinkedIn? You didn’t read those either?

Shame on you!

Norway’s Consumer Council did read them, though.

They actually did it together with researchers from Sintef as part of a study on social media. After having done so, they were very worried about violations of basic consumer rights.

Read more about the study here.

After having studied the user terms the researches made this summary:

A lot of red crosses, as you can see.
A short explanation for non-Norwegian readers: Nettby is a local social network site which is particularly popular among Norwegian teenagers. It is run by the newspaper VG, which is one of the most visited news sites in the world. Origo is a social network run by A-pressen, a chain of local newspapers.

A couple of conclusions from the Norwegian Consumer Council:

• Users typically give up their rights to personal information.
• User terms are normally designed in a way to make it impossible for users to understand the scope of what they accept.
• It is complicated to change the privacy settings
• User terms can be changed unilaterally by the site without your prior consent

The Consumer Council argues that interest groups need to work to protect the consumers’ privacy online.

I blog about this survey as I think it might be of interest for social network users outside Norway as well. The Norwegian Consumer Council has been very active in defending consumer rights on the web. A few years back it gained international attention when it launche a fight against how Apple failed to make its iTunes store compatible with other music players than iPod. A couple of weeks ago the council launched a similar attack on Amazon’s user terms for Kindle, claiming they violated basic consumer rights.

Never before has a so high percentage of the web users spent time on Facebook and other social networks as on Christmas Eve.

2,18 % of US visits on the web on Christmas Eve went to Facebook, according to a report from Hitwise.  That is compared to a 1,48 % average in November.

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The trend was even more clear in the UK, where one in 20 visits on Christmas Eve was to Facebook.

Hitwise concludes that social networks accounted for 1 in 10 UK web visits during the Christmas week, which is significantly higher than during the rest of the year.

But why is this? I think it proves how social networks like Facebook are becoming  an important part of people’s life. And in many countries Facebook has received a critical mass in the way that it has become a practical place to wish all your friends a Merry Christmas. To take myself as an example: I never got around to send out Christmas cards this year. But I did make sure to go to my Facebook profile to send all my best wishes to my friends.

And who needs Christmas cards anyway?  Today we have so many other ways to send our best wishes to friends and family.

More than anything else the statistics thus primarily demonstrate how big Facebook and similar networks has become, as MediaMemo points out.

New roles will be necessary in editorial organizations. Here are 10 of them, provided by the Swedish media blog Mindpark.

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Since the original posting is written in Swedish, I have decided to reblog the whole list from Mindpark in English for international readers.

Their main point is that tougher competition for media companies will force journalists to work in new ways. Here are the possible new roles editors should consider introducing in the editorial staff:

1. Search editor. An increasing portion of a site’s traffic comes from Google and other search engines. You need a person to follow this traffic closely.
2. Statistics editor. The web provides numerous opportunities to follow users behavior on your site closely.
3. Project editor. Many media companies seem to be much quicker to launch new project on paper than on the web. Why is that?
4. Link editor. Whoever links the most, will win in the end. But someone has to be responsible for the linking policy and activities.
5. Community editor. Being present in reader’s activities on our sites as well as outreaching to communities on other sites.
6. Network editor/ conversation editor. Picking up and responding to discussions about your brand on other sites.
7. Tag editor. Developing and maintaining tag structure. Most media companies are not very sophisticated in this regard.
8. Mashup editor. Including widgets and mashups on your site.
9. Web quality editor. Making sure the media site lives up to the new quality requirements on the web as well as incorporating new trends.
10. Internet editor. Covering what is happening on the web. Even local papers should do this!

That’s the list.  I think Mindpark has done a great job in identifying some of the new roles of editors and journalists.

Do you have any suggestions for other roles which should be on the list?