We’ve added a new setting so you can control who sees your list of answers on your profile.
We’ve also changed up the RSS and twitter feeds to raise the quality of list of questions, as well as include attribution to the users who ask them (since mysteriously, questions still are showing up on another answer site).
Get ready for more features to come!
a&b
If you hadn’t pieced together from all my questions about Paris and electricity and cell phones and whatnot, Ben and I are doing a work sprint from Paris this month (Ben will be arriving tomorrow, so expect updates from him as well).
We look forward to pushing a bunch of the new features we’ve been working and planning during the next few weeks. And of course, suggestions for things to do in Paris are great as well.
A few photos from my brick of an iPhone today:
Read the rest of this post »
This is part two of the interview with whatthefluther (Gary) and sccrowell (Sherry). If you missed part 1, read that first here. The Fluther community wishes this jelly couple a happy and long life together as husband and wife.
Since the widely popular Fluther Proposal, there aren’t many in the community that haven’t heard of whatthefluther and sccrowell. But even before that thread, the two were well lurved by all for their friendly personalities and caring answers. They’ve both seen a lot of ups and downs in life, but manage to continue smiling and spreading the happiness.
At first, it might seem unfair to devote only one interview to both these amazing people. Surely such interesting and charismatic people deserve their own interviews? However on Fluther, it is hard to think of one without thinking of the other. This is the first part of a two part interview with the couple.
There’s a unique one out in the wild, but you have to work for it! So, if you’re in LA, you have a chance if you’re quick!
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=ce9178cf-15f3-4720-930e-fd1a7985f3be
Sorry all, we had some issues with one of our servers that took a while to diagnose. It should be fixed now.
In the interim, though, avatars have been disabled. We’ll be looking to get those back up this weekend. Thanks for your patience.
Dear Jason Calacanis,
Stop stealing our users’ content. Your Q&A website, Mahalo Answers, is hijacking content from our Q&A site, Fluther.
We get it. You need to create doppelganger Twitter accounts to bolster your user base and create content. Perhaps some Twitter users are fine with the fact that their tweets are being co-opted by you to drive traffic. But we won’t allow you to strip out the attribution to our users simply to pad your own corpus of questions.
UPDATE 6.2.09:
Thank you for all for your responses.
As we continue to hone in on the issue, there has been a lot of discussion about “can you copyright a tweet” — albeit partly because we framed part of our argument that way.
For us though, that’s not the interesting issue — this issue is more about attribution.
Ultimately, we don’t care if questions on Fluther are reposted other places (we’re quite happy with the quality of responses here compared to other places). The central issue for us, though, is the fact that the attribution was stripped out to make it seem as if the content was being generated somewhere else. It’s less about copyright infringement and more about proper citation and plagiarism.
We know that content on Fluther is going to turn up other places — and we welcome that. But the only difference between plagiarism and sampling in a read/write culture is attribution — and that’s what was missing: a tiny twitter link does not attribution make.
We’re happy that Jason has responded to us (thank you). We look forward to Mahalo either attributing or removing the questions.
Meanwhile, we think we can do a better job with attribution in the tweetfeed and rss as well. We’ll be looking to change that in the coming days.
Andrew & Ben
—————–
Here’s one example (of quite a few):
Our question, asked by rexpresso, http://www.fluther.com/disc/45600/where-can-i-buy-mp3-that-can-be-used-for-commercial/ generated this tweet to our Twitter account. Our twitterfeed posts a tweet for every single question, including a link back to our site (just like RSS), as is required by our Terms of Service.
Now, look at: http://www.mahalo.com/answers/music/where-can-i-buy-mp3-that-can-be-used-for-commercial-purposes. You are making an exact copy of this question, categorizing it in your system, stripping out the attribution link (as required by our terms) and hosting in on Mahalo Answers.
In your response to our cease and desist email, you say “our users can answer questions from the public timeline on Twitter…” [1]
That’s fine. Your users can answer our questions. But that’s entirely different than you repurposing our tweet on your site and stripping out the links to the original question in order to make it seem like one of your users asked it.
You also say “we don’t feel you can copyright a publicly asked question.” [1] To this, we respond with the Twitter Terms of Service:
1. We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours.
That means that all those tweets posted by us are, in fact, copyrighted by us and may not be repackaged and hosted by you against our will. Why not just scrape Fluther.com directly for question titles and ask them on your site under an assumed name? (Hint: don’t do that, either)
We know many Web 2.0 companies wrestle with murky legal waters, and we’re all doing our best by using good judgment, intuition and honor.
Except you.
This is not a murky case. This is not like hosting a link to an illegal bittorrent, which may require some legal nuance. This is one company publicly infringing upon the rights of another company and their users, and we find it appalling that you’re standing behind this deplorable practice.
So please, put an end to this.
Ben Finkel & Andrew McClain
Fluther.com Co-Founders
For a full list of lifted content, see http://www.mahalo.com/member/fluther
[1] Letter from Jason Calacanis
From: Jason McCabe Calacanis
Date: Fri, May 29, 2009 at 3:35 PM
Subject: Re: Stop hijacking our content
To: Ben Finkel
Thanks for the email.
We don’t autoscrape questions, but our users can answer questions from the public timeline on Twitter… those publicly asked questions can be answered by anyone, anywhere at any time based on fair use (ie including on twitter or a person’s blog).
In other words, we don’t feel you can copyright a publicly asked questions.
However, I respect your right to disagree with my position.
All the Best, jason
—————
XXXXXX@Calacanis.com | Mobile: XXX-XXX-XXXX
http://www.calacanis.com | http://www.mahalo.com
Executive Assistant: XXXX@calacanis.com
From: Ben Finkel
Date: Fri, 29 May 2009 14:34:31 -0700
To:
Subject: Stop hijacking our content
Dear Mr. Calacanis,
I’m writing this letter to inform you that your Q&A website, Maholo Answers, is hijacking content from our Q&A website, Fluther.com. Apparently you’re scraping content from Twitter, including our questions, and reposting them as yours without attribution or links back to our website (a clear breech of our terms of service).
Please delete all content associated with the user “fluther” and cease and desist this practice immediately.
Ben Finkel
Fluther.com Co-Founder & CEO
–
Tap the collective.
http://www.fluther.com
With great exhaustion, we present to you the new and improved Flutherbot.
After the lengthy alpha stage, he’s new and improved — and instead of spamming you with a bunch of questions, you can control how often he gives you questions with our new notification settings. We’ve added Gmail/GTalk/Jabber support as well.
Additionally, we’re now notifying you when people give you comments and have improved when we send you activity emails (only one email when you’re logged out and get new activity) — and, again, this is a setting that you can turn off.
There were some issues during the deployment — so there may be some tiny snags in our little mechanical friend as we work out his kinks in the next few days, but rest assured, he’ll love you no matter what.
We’ve added some new easter eggs in Mr. Flutherbot as well — so treat him like a friend. A friend with a robotic brain that used to be annoying and has a propensity for breaking down.
Hi Flutherites,
Long time no blog. It may have sounded quiet around here, but we’ve been busy working on lots of things under the hood and today we’d like to announce a neat new feature that’s been requested by many of you: profile answers! Now when you click on user profiles, you can see not just their questions, but also their answers. This allows you to get a much better snapshot of your fellow Fluther users, and also track what your favorite Flutherites are answering.
A few of you mentioned some possible privacy concerns regarding this feature, and we’ve done our best to address that by making the list of answers only available to registered members (which also prevents Google from indexing the page).
We hope you enjoy this new feature, and we welcome your comments.
As part of our continual refining of Fluther’s vision, Ben and I sent out a new moderation policy to the mod team last night, and I wanted to share it with the collective. One thing we’ve honed in on as we define what’s acceptable on the site is motive — why someone is asking a question. We’ve touched on this in the new community guidelines, but I’ll spell it out more succinctly here.
We’ll be institutionalizing this as we revamp the asking process in the near future.
(Also! The next jellytable will be on Thursday, April 9, at 10AM Pacific time).