TOSAmend: The easy way to modify web service Terms of Service agreements

Have you ever read any of the terms of service documents you agree to when you sign up to your favorite web apps?

Of course you don’t.  Those documents are tens, sometimes hundreds, of pages long. You sign away even your most basic of rights.  They’re in legalise.  Even if you could read them, it would take you all day! And you’d have to spend countless more hours just trying to understand the lawyer-talk in them!.  And yet, they are REALLY important! Should any discrepancy between yourself and the other party be brought into a court of law, they will could potentially have a HUGE effect (monetary, or otherwise) on your life!

What if, instead of just blindly agreeing to a TOS document you haven’t read, you could just amend the TOS right there on the spot? Right there on the sign-up form.

Did you know that, when you’re signing a legal contract in the United States, you have the right to strikeout any clause that you do not understand or do not agree to? [source] With the TOSAmend bookmarklet, you can also easily do this with web-based contracts and terms of services.

With this handy little javascript bookmarklet I’ve developed, you can. Drag and drop this bookmarklet into your browser bookmark bar to use TOSAmend. I’ve tested in Chrome and Firefox. IE version forthcoming.

TOSAmend

When you use the TOSAmend bookmarklet, it will modify the TOS on the page, and pass the amended terms back to the site (via the ‘TOSAmended’ GET or POST parameter), where the web-service can either accept or reject them.

Here’s a 30 second demo of this bookmarklet in action:

Full Disclaimer: I am an web app builder, not a lawyer, so I am unsure where using TOSAmend to amend terms of services would (or would not) hold up in court as a legally-permissible way of modifying a contract. I intend this as an experiment, proof of concept, and as a conversation starter about the relationship between and rights of applications and their users. I assume no responsibility for your use of this bookmarklet in the wild. Use at your own risk.

Here is the bookmarklet one more time. Drag it into your browser bar to use TOSAmend:

TOSAmend

Cheers and have fun!  For updates on this project, follow @TOSAmend on twitter, join our google group, or check out facebook.com/TOSAmend. Oh, and I’m @owocki on twitter. Happy to answer your questions there.

EDIT: This project is now hosted on a github public repo. Feel free to contribute.

EDIT 2: A debate has broken out on reddit about TOSAmend’s legal viability (in its current form) in the United States.

UPDATE 12/3/2011: I’ve released a legally viable version of TOSAmend. More details @ http://owocki.com/2011/12/03/occupytheweb-change-the-terms-of-online-agreements/

Hey Google, Gmail is Awfully Slow!

For a company that makes a lot of noise about how the web should be blazing fast, Google has been awfully slow to address performance concerns in one of their flagship apps, Gmail.

Sometimes conversations can take up to 20 seconds to load.   Searches too.  Sometimes they will not load at all and a vague “This conversation could not be loaded” message will appear in your browser.

I’ve tried posting on their support forums, contacting Google Apps for Business support, tweeting @google and @dondoge.  No one seems to care.  Either that, or no one seems to be able to diagnose the issue.

I’ve spoken to many folks, and the problems aren’t just limited to me.  I’d love it for someone at Google to at least acknowledge that there are scaling issues in GMail.  Please leave a comment below if your GMail or Google Mail for Business account is slow.  Hopefully someone at google will listen!

For the record, I love Gmail and it is centric to my workflow day-to-day, which is why it’s so frustrating that no one at Google can help. If you’re reading this post from inside the GooglePlex, shoot me an email. kevin [at] ignighter [dot] com/  I’d love to help you diagnose the issue.

EDIT:  Since there’s been questions about whether or not the problem is at my end, here are my system and connection specs: I’m on a state of the art macbook air, and the problems described occur on every modern browser (chrome, firefox, safari)), and they occur on every wifi network I connect to (Cable, DSL).  No firewall.  250K conversations in my inbox using 20G of space,

10 Internet Giants, 10 Years ago

I love using tools like the Internet Archive to see what websites looked like years ago. Just for fun, take a trip in internet history with me:

Each of these businesses are top 100 sites in the USA and have “grown up” in the past 10 years. Each screenshot is half “retro” and half “current” (either left/right or top/bottom). Click on a screenshot to see the comparison full-screen.

Apple: 2000 vs. 2011

Yahoo: 2000 vs. 2011

Wikipedia: 2002 vs. 2011

Twitter: 2006 vs. 2011

Paypal: 2000 vs. 2011

Google: 1998 vs. 2011

Facebook: 2004 vs. 2011

Ebay: 2001 vs. 2011

Blogger: 2000 vs. 2011

Youtube: 2005 vs. 2011

Wow, how the internet has changed in the past decade! I wonder what the faces of these businesses will look like in 2020. One thing is for sure: There will be many new additions to the Top 100 Websites in 2020!