GizaPage – Shame About the T&Cs

Launched today into public beta, GizaPage is hoping to reach the holy grail (in my view) of social network self management, the Social Quarterback – a single place where one can update each and every social network, manage contacts, profiles and all that goodness without having to jump from site to site. It’s a little like chi.mp but with some added, and rather useful functionality. You sign up, add the services you want to use (choose from about 40 or so including all the main SocNets), import contacts and you’re presented with a neat tabbed UI providing access to each service. Great, I’ve been banging on to people I know about having a decent Social Quarterback for a couple of years now and we’ll see if GizaPage can live up to the promise.

BUT

Concern #1 – Sign Up is a Lousy UX Sign up is yet another account creation form. Why no use of OpenID or even Facebook Connect? When will sites learn that having another account for managing sites is not the smart route?

Concern #2 – Onerous T&Cs You know that innocuous little “I accept the terms” check box we all just bypass to get at the goodies. Well, don’t just yet. A few months back Facebook tried to grant themselves a license to do what they wanted with anything you created within their walls. The crowd cried foul and Facebook recanted. Well GizaPage have done it as well. Just look at section 9 of the T&C’s. Lurking in there is subsection 9.3 reading as;

posting User Content to any part of the Website, including any third party service rendered “tabs”, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to GizaPage an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid up, worldwide licence including the right to sublicence, to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose.

Aside from the simple fact that GizaPage is providing merely a conduit for this information to the site of one’s choice (granted a quick and useful conduit) their Privacy Statements make it quite clear they won’t be sharing this content with any one else.

This granting of a license is odd, when actually using GizaPage the creation of content is actually done on the original service site – displayed within a frame. Technically here you are NOT creating your content on GizaPage’s site (you do when editing permissions, over all profile pages and such), so anything you do say against Friendfeed should not fall under their license – in theory at least.

Concern #3 – A Right to Change Terms So why grant themselves a license? Seems harmless enough but also hiding in the T&C’s GizaPage grant themselves a right to change those terms at whim and without notification.

Can anyone else see a problem here?

I’m off for a play with the site BUT I will be careful what content I create for now, at least, until some clarification over these T&Cs is made.