App.net terms of service (TOS)

In a recent Founders Talk and an episode of The Industry Radio Show, I had the awesome pleasure of chatting with Dalton Caldwell about his journey as a Founder, but more importantly, I was able to chat with him about some of the innovative things they are doing at App.net.

When aiming for transparency with developers (something Twitter has struggled with over the past few years), something as simple as publishing your Terms of Service on GitHub goes a long way to show TRUE transparency.

From the readme:

The App.net terms of service documents live here. To facilitate transparent discussion, we encourage users to create issues and/or submit pull requests with your feedback. Our general process is to incorporate user feedback on a roughly quarterly basis based on review with our legal team, but in the early stages this may occur significantly more often.

What I love most is that transparency in changes to App.net’s terms of service are not only collaborative, but they are also just a diff away. In fact, if you wanted to get all Git about it, you could git-blame the actual person who committed the change.

Kudos to Dalton and the choice’s they are making at App.net for being transparent and developer centric!

If you don’t have an App.net account, use this link to get a free account: join.app.net/from/adamstac