re-nightmares.com

PollDaddy is based in Sligo, Ireland. CEO David Lenehan told me the company will be staying there and that his office becomes, “Automattic’s first office anywhere in the world.” Lenehan is “extremely happy” with the deal, terms of which he did not disclose. He said that PollDaddy was “profitable and growing at a nice rate” prior to the acquisition.

Polldaddy has already been integrated into Wordpress.com's authoring system.

Product changes that have already been implemented include tighter integration into Wordpress.com hosted blogs and a transition to Automattic’s data centers. In a blog post about the acquisition, Lenehan wrote, “Over the coming weeks and months this will mean our site will be a lot more stable, polls will load faster, and everything should run just the way you want it to.”

The company will continue to stay “100 percent focused on building PollDaddy support into as many platforms as possible, so you will see our support for MySpace, Ning, Blogger, Typepad, Hi5, Orkut, Piczo, etc. continue to improve and grow,” Lenehan also wrote.

Web-based polling and survey company PollDaddy has been acquired by Automattic, the company behind the Wordpress platform and the Wordpress.com blog hosting service.

See also: Matt Mullenweg’s blog: PollDaddy Goes Automattic

In a barter arrangement with CNET, PollDaddy ran the voting system for the last Webware 100 awards.

PollDaddy offers free polls. (My most recent one is on this post: Five old-fashioned Web concepts that need to die.) The option to run more detailed surveys costs either $200 or $899 a year, depending on the volume of replies you’ve signed up for.

5.1 channels, 30 watts per channel
Three HDMI 1.3a inputs
Standard Dolby Digital and DTS decoding
Two component video inputs
Five digital audio inputs (two optical, three coaxial)
Source input renaming
No onscreen display with HDMI, standard-def menus
$400 list price, available in July
Read the full user manual (PDF)

Of course, Harman Kardon fans have always trumpeted the brand’s excellent sound, but we’ll have to wait until we get our hands on a review sample to do a comparison. Harman Kardon also puts a big emphasis on making products easy to use, and we have to admit that the company’s manuals are a cut above the competition.

Step-up features on the Harman Kardon 354:

Harman Kardon 354

Don’t get spooked that the watts-per-channel specs on these receivers seem low. While other manufacturers tend to inflate their power ratings, Harman Kardon sticks to real-world numbers–in other words, Harman Kardon’s 30-watt receiver may sound just as loud as another company’s “100-watt” receiver.

Harman Kardon AVR 354

The following products are available:

On Sale Now: $599.99
View the latest prices for Harman/Kardon AVR 254

7.1 channels, 75 watts per channel
Three component video inputs
Six digital audio inputs (three optical, three coaxial)
Includes The Bridge II docking station for
iPod
$800 list price, available now
Read the full user manual (PDF)

While most audio manufacturers trot out a new line of AV receivers every year, Harman Kardon generally sits out of the “feature war” and lets its models stay in the product line longer. That’s why it’s a big deal that the company has announced three new receivers, bringing many cutting-edge features that were previously missing from the company’s lineup. As always, these new receivers have Harman’s typically refined look, and now that some of the models include updated features–like high-resolution audio decoding, a high-def graphical user interface, and video upconversion–you won’t have to settle for beauty without brains. Let’s take an in-depth look at the new line.

Harman Kardon 154

7.1 channels, 50 watts per channel
Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio decoding
Faroudja DCDi Cinema video processing, with upconversion to 1080p
High-definition user interace
Automatic speaker calibration
XM-ready
$600 list price, available now
Read the full user manual (PDF)

Key features of the Harman Kardon 154:

(Credit:
Harman Kardon)

Step-up features on the Harman Kardon 254:

Harman Kardon 254

On Sale Now: $978.99
View the latest prices for Harman Kardon AVR 354

Overall, these receivers are a big improvement over the existing models, but they’ll face an uphill battle versus the competition. Onkyo’s TX-SR606 has most of the same features as the Harmon Kardon 254–plus it has four HDMI inputs–and it’s currently selling online for about $440. Sony is also offering four HDMI inputs in the midrange level, and the STR-DG820 only costs $400.

(Credit:
Harman Kardon)

(Credit:
Harman Kardon)

The de facto registrar of superlative achievements has credited Mozilla for officially setting a record for downloads in a 24-hour period: 8,002,530 copies of
Firefox.

I’m skeptical that Download Day in and of itself will appreciably shift Firefox’s market share results in the short term. But it did probably coax people toward a more modern browser, which Web site operators probably are happy to see, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Mozilla managed to sign up more Firefox fanboys through its promotional devices.

“As the arbiter and recorder of the world’s amazing facts, Guinness World Records is pleased to add Mozilla’s achievement to our archives,” Gareth Deaves, Guinness’ records manager, said in a statement.

Though Download Day was a big publicity stunt, it’s hard to sniff with too much disdain at the total. To me at least it indicates that people see more in this particular browser than just a bundle of bits to surf the Web; they like its technology, its open-source nature or other attributes, and downloading and using it is an event somewhat akin to suffering in line for hours for rock show tickets or to buy an
iPhone.

Also for the record, Net Applications gave Firefox 3 2.31 percent market share for the entire month of June, compared with 4.28 percent for
Safari 3.1, 16.13 percent for Firefox 2, 26.38 percent for Internet Explorer 6, and 46.45 percent for No. 1 IE 7. The statistics are based on actual usage at various major search engines. Because Firefox 3 was released midway through June, the statistics likely will show significantly greater share for it in July.

Mozilla’s Download Day on June 17, whose server-crippling success delayed its official start, sought to popularize the open-source Web browser. Mozilla, which oversees the Firefox project, projected at the time that it cleared 8 million, but the number is now official.

It wasn’t too long ago that a 4GB flash drive for under 20 bucks was worth crowing about, but now you can get an A-DATA 8GB PD9 MyFlash drive for $16.99 shipped. It’s a new, retail unit with no rebates in sight.

As you might expect, this is a pretty no-frills drive. It has…get ready…an LED indicator! And it’s driverless! Hey, for $16.99, don’t expect the thing to be spitting out Pez.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

(Credit:
SuperMediaStore.com)

Needless to say, with 8GB of storage, you can carry plenty of data back and forth between your home and work PCs. Of course, flash drives are good for more than just ferrying files. Check out Lifehacker’s Top 10 USB Thumb Drive Tricks to learn how to boot an operating system, assemble a PC repair kit, and more. In the meantime, grab this incredibly good deal before it’s too late.

Not all organizations feel the same way, and have built up years of expertise managing the BlackBerry inside their walls. Frank Gillman, the CTO for Los Angeles law firm Allen Matkins, says there has been some interest in the iPhone among his constituents but he finds it more cost-effective to stay a BlackBerry shop.

There’s also the issue that corporations will have to install iTunes on every iPhone user’s computer, which might not be part of the standard application list employed by big conservative corporations that grudgingly allow their employees to check baseball scores on ESPN.com from their PCs. And some IT managers also like to lock down a specific collection of software on the mobile device itself, but have no real way of preventing an employee from going home and adding Asphalt 4: Elite Racing to their iPhone.

And while Apple’s 2.0 software update brought along several business-friendly features that improved the security and manageability of the device, some analyst firms that advise CIOs on how to spend their technology dollars still feel the iPhone’s security isn’t quite where it should be compared with other options in the market. Gartner, the 800-pound gorilla of IT consulting, gave the iPhone a thumbs-up in July after the release of the 2.0 software but noted that iPhone security isn’t strong enough yet when it comes to custom applications on the device.

(Credit:
Apple)

But small businesses don’t have the same strict security and manageability requirements as larger enterprises, allowing them to move forward with iPhones more quickly than the big guys. Independent observers of that market are seeing more and more demand for iPhones among those types of customers, who fly under the radar individually but could add up to serious revenue for Apple.

While the iPhone may not be the ideal device from a manageability and security standpoint, it does come with high customer satisfaction ratings among business users.

(Credit: CC Cristiano Betta)

Jurcyzk is following the recommendations of J. Gold Associates by having his employees access secure corporate data through the iPhone’s
Safari browser backed by the firm’s own security certificate. That way, no sensitive data actually resides on the device, but users can still open documents and view them with “full fidelity,” which is a huge plus for traveling lawyers who need to review documents with clients anywhere and everywhere, he said.

“My philosophy is that devices are personal, and it’s difficult for organizations to standardize on a single device” given the wide range of preferences people have with mobile computers, Jurczyk said.

Before too long, businesses might decide that certain trade-offs regarding the manageability of their smartphones are worth making, so long as their concerns over security are met. Analysts expect Apple to improve the native security of the iPhone over the next several years, and it’s also possible that a major third-party enterprise software vendor such as SAP will step forward with a product that does it for them.

Well over 200 business-related applications are available on the App Store that help make the iPhone easier to use in a corporate setting. If Apple finds a way to improve the security profile of the iPhone to allow organizations to develop custom applications that store sensitive data on the device, it will have another feather in its cap.

Businesses are gradually getting used to the idea of using iPhones in the enterprise, but Apple has a long way to go.

“Our reasons for not doing so have more to do with the age-old issue of having a finite number of internal resources to support our firm’s technology. Given our already significant investment in BlackBerry, we cannot make a strong business case for adopting yet another platform.”

Apple has captivated the general public with the
iPhone, but has it convinced the business world to take the plunge?

That’s just part of the uphill battle the iPhone faces in the enterprise. For one thing, Apple’s dependence on a single carrier is a nonstarter for some companies that have long existing relationships with a different carrier, and enjoy the discounts that come along with that partnership.

There is some overlap in those numbers, represented by companies such as Chicago law firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, a participant in Apple’s beta program.

About half of CIO Andy Jurcyzk’s 1,800 employees worldwide use some kind of mobile device, and at the moment, 200 of those people are using the iPhone 3G. Sonnenschein’s employees who are deemed worthy of mobile computers can get the company to buy them a new mobile device every 24 months–provided that AT&T carries that device.

“Other devices are just hardcore e-mail devices, and even at that they don’t render the messages well,” Sonnenschein’s Jurcyzk said. “I travel a lot and it’s nice to have a personal aspect to my life, to look at photos of the family, to listen to music, or watch a movie. It’s nice to have that other stuff.”

And there’s a sense inside some corporations that times are changing as mobile phones become computers that aren’t just for business, and aren’t just for fun. Executives and salespeople–the primary users of mobile computers in the enterprise–are constantly on the go, and an executive waiting for an airplane who pauses an episode of Mad Men to answer an e-mail from a client is a productive, accessible, and satisfied employee.

Apple’s not the only company adapting to that shift in how we use mobile computers. “The new BlackBerry Storm that is coming out this month from RIM/Verizon brings a lot of the iPhone design and features to the BlackBerry platform. Assuming the device works as advertised, we’ll likely offer that as an option for our folks who want those types of features,” Gillman said. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has also said similar things about the need for future versions of Windows Mobile to cater to both personal and business tasks.

At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June, Jobs said 33 percent of the Fortune 500 had participated in Apple’s beta program for the iPhone 2.0 software. But RIM still dominates the market for mobile devices used for business purposes.

Still, J. Gold Associates predicts just 16 percent of U.S. corporations to have an active interest in the iPhone in three years. The iPhone isn’t going to put RIM out of business just yet. But it is challenging the other company in its backyard, just as RIM doubles down with its efforts to make the BlackBerry more consumer-friendly with models like the Storm and the Bold. And it’s making everyone more aware of the trade-offs and needs of mobile computer users in the enterprise, which will make everyone’s product better in the long run.

But the iPhone is making a guerrilla attack on the business world, brought into the corporate world by influential executives, CIOs rethinking their approach to deploying technology, and younger workers who move seamlessly between their personal and business lives.

(Credit:
J. Gold Associates)

There are several high-profile businesses, such as Genentech and Disney (both with strong ties to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, of course), that have declared their intentions to work with Apple on deploying iPhones inside their corporations. That seems to be having the effect of increasing the overall number of business smartphone users, however, rather than turning the iPhone into any kind of “BlackBerry killer.”

The BlackBerry is still by far the preferred choice of the enterprise, but the iPhone is gaining ground, according to J. Gold Associates.

According to data from J. Gold Associates released in September, 65.5 percent of North American businesses that deploy mobile computers say they actively support the BlackBerry, compared with 22 percent that support Windows Mobile devices and just over 10 percent that support the iPhone.

And if Apple proves itself as an enterprise-friendly company with the iPhone, those famously stodgy CIOs might be tempted to take a second look at the
Mac.

Even after the March preview of the “business-friendly” iPhone 2.0 software for the iPhone released in July, it seems that most iPhones are being purchased by individuals rather than corporations, who still look first at Research In Motion’s BlackBerry when it comes to equipping their workers with mobile computers.

Wunder Radio’s extras are also serviceable–you’ll be able to save and view favorites, stream stations in the background, and open a URL from the application. In addition to the standalone application, Wunder Radio installs a home screen plug-in onto most phones (our Samsung Omnia’s default theme blocked this) that streams program and song information and offers a shortcut to favorite stations.

(Credit:
Weather Underground)

There’s no shortage of streaming radio apps for mobile phones, but lately it seems that far more have been readied for the
iPhone than for Windows Mobile. On Thursday, Wunder Radio
(download), already a popular iPhone radio app, also became available for Windows Mobile phones.

It may not be the prettiest radio app out there, but Wunder Radio packs in a ton of stations provided by Radio Time, around 36,000. The stations span everything from talk radio and Weather Underground’s local weather reports to the browsing, searching, and genre-scouring you’d expect from a streaming radio application. The search engine, we might add, is sensitive to radio show and show host names in addition to station names and call letters. If your smartphone or Pocket PC is GPS-enabled, Wunder Radio can fetch some of your local stations.

Update 2/19/09 at 5:00 PM PT: Wunder Radio does not fully support phones with a WQVGA resolution. These phones should still receive audio, but may not display images. Jeyo, the company that developed Wunder Radio for Weather Underground, told us that support for these phones will be added next.

Price may be the only major sticking point with Wunder Radio. The Windows Mobile version costs just shy of $10 as part of a 30-day promotion, after which the app’s price shoots up to $14.99. While competing radio applications like Pandora for Windows Mobile don’t have the breadth of Wunder Radio’s stations, or even its goal (Pandora Radio is concerned with music discovery, not with talk radio and finding particular stations), Pandora’s free application may satisfy many music-seekers. For those with more specific tastes, Wunder Radio’s broad tuner gives you a good chance of finding what you seek. A free, 15-day trial period gives you time to bond with the app, after which you’ll decide if you’re ready to buy.

Note: As it goes with streaming radio apps, faster data connection speeds through 3G and Wi-Fi produce the best sound, with fewer interruptions and skips.

WASHINGTON — A long awaited report from the Internet Safety Technical Task Force concludes that children and teens are less vulnerable to sexual predation than many have feared. The report also questions the efficacy and necessity of some commonly prescribed remedies designed to protect young people.

Age verification options presented by some companies would allow parents to request that their child’s school verify his or her identity and age, but these proposals have their own critics including those who worry about the cost, the possibility of privacy or security leaks, and the financial model presented in some cases that includes providing marketers with information about kids.

Another danger is that age verification or new rules could be used to keep kids off of social networks or require parental consent. But before issuing rules about this, authorities should explore possible unintended consequences such as isolating kids, causing them to go underground, failing to serve kids from dysfunctional families, and preventing kids from accessing vital services such as the Suicide Prevention Hotline or one of the many online self-help groups.

Disclosure: I served as a member of the task force, representing ConnectSafely.org, a nonprofit internet safety organization I co-founded along with Anne Collier. ConnectSafely receives financial support from MySpace, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and other Internet and social-networking companies. I am also founder of SafeKids.com and am on the board of directors of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which is represented on the task force.

The attorneys general who called for the task force were anxious for us to study the efficacy of using age verification to help limit inappropriate contact between adults and children online. To help in that job, the task force formed a technical advisory board (TAB) composed of technology experts from Harvard, MIT, Dartmouth, University of Massachusetts, University of Utah, Rochester Institute of Technology, and Bank of America. This board looked at a wide range of technologies including age verification and identity authentication, filtering and auditing, text analysis, and biometrics.

While the task force found that youth risk from predators is a concern, the overwhelming majority of youth are not in danger of being harmed by an adult predator they meet online. To the extent that young people have received an unwanted online sexual solicitation, data from a 2000 study and a 2006 follow-up from the Crimes Against Children Research Center concludes that “youth identify most sexual solicitors as being other adolescents (48 percent in 2000; 43 percent in 2006) or young adults between the ages of 18 and 21 (20 percent; 30 percent), with few (4 percent; 9 percent) coming from older adults, and the remaining being of unknown age.”

Importantly, the task force found that online risks “are not radically different in nature or scope than the risks minors have long faced offline, and minors who are most at risk in the offline world continue to be most at risk online.” For example, “a poor home environment full of conflict and poor parent-child relationships is correlated with a host of online risks.”

There is also a widespread belief that deception is often involved where adults pose as teens to engage with young people, but research shows that that’s rarely the case. The report found that “although identity deception may occur online, it does not appear to play a large role in criminal cases in which adult sex offenders have been arrested for sex crimes in which they met victims online.” Interviews with police show that “most victims are underage adolescents who know they are going to meet adults for sexual encounters.” This does not imply that such relationships are healthy or safe, nor that we should blame the victims or tolerate the actions of adults who engage in sex with minors. But it does suggest that child safety advocates need to take a more proactive role in helping teens understand the risk of engaging in relationships with adults.

The task force was formed as a result of a joint agreement between MySpace and 49 state attorneys general.

Over the past couple of years, several state AGs have been looking into potential dangers to youth, and some have called for social-network sites to use age verification technology to confirm the ages of users in an attempt to prevent adults from or interacting online with minors. The task force includes representatives of Internet and social-networking companies, security and identity authentication vendors, and nonprofit advocacy organizations. It’s chaired by John Palfrey of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Still, there remains a minority of youth who–for a variety of psychological and social reasons–are vulnerable both online and offline. More research needs to be done to identify these young people and provide them with resources and protective services. The fact that most kids are safe is reassuring but it’s not sufficient. If even one child is in danger, then there is work to be done, and that is one thing everyone who cares about this issue can agree on.

But even if these technologies can be employed effectively, there remains the question of whether they are necessary or helpful. Using technology to separate kids from grown-ups doesn’t address the fact that kids are far more at risk from other kids than from adult predators.

At one task force meeting, a company presented technology that tries to distinguish between an adult and a child by analyzing the bone density of the person’s hand. Another tool attempts to identify an individual through facial recognition to match that person against a database of registered sex offenders.

What the task force did find is that “bullying and harassment, most often by peers, are the most salient threats that minors face, both online and offline.” Partially because researchers can’t agree on a definition of bullying and harassment, the actual risk is hard to quantify, but it is clearly much higher than the risk of being harmed by a predator. Some studies suggest that as many as 49 percent of youth have experienced some type of bullying or harassment. In many cases no serious emotional or physical harm occurred. However, a study by Michelle Ybarra and Janice Wolak found that “39 percent of victims reported emotional distress over being harassed online.”

What the TAB found was that age verification technology can be used to identify adults and therefore help prevent minors from engaging in adult-only activities such as accessing adult content or purchasing alcohol or tobacco. There were several technologies submitted by companies that could identify adults based on accessible records such as credit reports, criminal history, and real estate transactions, but these relatively automated systems cannot reliably identify or verify the age of minors because, as the TAB concluded, “public records of minors range from quite limited to nonexistent.” Documentation about young people such as birth certificates, passports, and school records are restricted by federal law for some very good privacy and security reasons.

The TAB also looked at “peer-based” verification schemes that “allow peers in a community to vote, recommend, or rate whether a person is in an appropriate age group based on relationships and personal knowledge established offline” but worried that with these methods “users can vote as many times as they wish to artificially raise or lower a peer rating.” There were concerns that “minors might organize against another minor in their ratings or recommendations in an online form of bullying.”

Although the TAB expressed “cautious optimism” about the possibility of using technology to protect kids, it concluded that “every technology has its problems” and that “no single technology reviewed could solve every aspect of online safety for minors, or even one aspect of it one hundred percent of the time.” The bottom line was that “technology can play a role but cannot be the sole input to improved safety for minors online” and that “the most effective technology solution is likely to be a combination of technologies.”

Based on data analyzed by its Research Advisory Board, the task force concluded that “actual threats that youth may face appear to be different than the threats most people imagine” and that “the image presented by the media of an older male deceiving and preying on a young child does not paint an accurate picture of the nature of the majority of sexual solicitations and Internet-initiated offline encounters.”

The task force report will have its critics, including possibly some attorneys general and others who feel that it underestimates the risk of online predators. Indeed, sting operations from law enforcement (as well as the TV show To Catch a Predator) demonstrate that there are plenty of adults who, if given the chance, would engage in sex with youth they meet online. But, based on the research presented to the task force, it appears that the vast majority of young people are savvy enough to avoid such encounters.

Apple circuit board orders point to new notebooks?

Microsoft’s online gamble could be a smart bet

The E3 trade show finished up this week in Los Angeles. CNET News’ Daniel Terdiman covered this annual get-together for game developers and he has a wrap-up of the big news–as well as what will be the overarching technology themes to come out of this year’s show.

Download today’s podcast

Today’s stories:

Lastly, it’s almost time for the back-to-school season and mounting signs suggest that Apple may be ready to revamp its notebook computer line.

Listen now:

If you’re Microsoft and you’ve got deeper pockets than nearly any institution outside of Fort Knox, you can spend yourself silly. But the statement by the company’s CFO about pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a struggling part of its business has a logic behind it. CNET News’ Ina Fried explains.

AT&T mistakenly announces free Wi-Fi for iPhone users…again

This methodology can lead to wild fluctuations from year to year. Jobs topped the 2006 list with $646 million thanks to a stock package. But he slid to 11 in the 2007 with $14.6 million in annual compensation.

Congratulations, Larry Ellison, you’re No. 1!

It’s another big win for Ellison, who recently won a $3 million tax break on his $200 million estate in swanky Woodside, Calif. Ellison’s lawyers successfully argued that the house suffered from “significant functional obsolescence” because it turns out there’s a limited market for 23-acre estates built to look like 16th century Japanese summer palaces.

Just missing the top 10 were Apple’s Steve Jobs at No. 11 and Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz at No. 12. Being named on a tech exec compensation list is probably the last thing Schwartz needed Friday, given that Sun’s share price dropped more than 22 percent in one day of trading, thanks to very disappointing earnings news.

Take what you will from the Forbes list: You can argue some of the execs earned their money, you can say many of them didn’t. But all of them probably make far more money than you and me.

Why was he so angry? The methodology for measuring executive compensation tends to vary from publication to publication. That makes some sense, of course, since the methodology (or rationale) for lavishing millions on executives tends to vary from company to company. Forbes’ list relies on “calculating the overall compensation for the past year for executives, factoring in salary, cash bonuses, vested stock grants, stock gains and exercised stock options,” according to the magazine.

There were a few surprises as well as the usual cast of well-compensated characters. Second on the tech list was Nabeel Gareeb of MEMC Electronic Materials, a little-known silicon wafer manufacturing company in Missouri. Rounding out the top 10 were Cisco’s John Chambers, Hewlett-Packard’s Mark Hurd, Nividia’s Jen-Hsun Huang, IBM’s Sam Palmisano, Corning’s Wendell Weeks, EMC’s Joe Tucci, Agilent’s William Sullivan, and Intel’s Paul Otellini.

As a rule, executives (particularly the ones at under-performing companies) hate making these lists, because of the inevitable “are shareholders really getting their money’s worth?” questions they engender. I know this firsthand: I used to have the pleasure of calling people to let them know they made the grade for the top executive compensation list at BusinessWeek. Once, a well-known Silicon Valley mogul gave me an earful off the record. He said something along the lines of: “This is bull***t. And you know it’s bull***t. And you can tell your boss it’s bull***t.”

2007 was a very good year for Larry Ellison.

Forbes, as it does every year, has released its list of top executive salaries. In the overall list as well as the technology category, Ellison, the Oracle chief exec and billionaire yachtsman, was tops with total 2007 compensation at $192.9 million.

The introduction of this poll by Facebook is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, and most obviously, the mere existence of the poll seems to suggest that Facebook is considering changing its terms of use. At the very least, it looks like it is willing to look at user feedback on the decision, potentially affecting what they do in the future.

Even after CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a statement on behalf of Facebook regarding the issue, it appears that Facebook wants more feedback from its users. Facebook has begun to run a poll in its users’ News Feeds, asking them their opinion on the TOS change. The poll gives three options: no, I don’t know, and yes.

As you can see, the Facebook community is speaking loudly on this issue. The votes are leaning toward “Yes,” with a significant portion being uninformed about the issue and answering “I don’t know.”

The users who think that the TOS should remain the same only account for 6 percent of the total user base. It’s great to see that Facebook, at the very least, wants to hear what their users are saying. Hopefully, we will see more creative uses of the polling system in the future.

Facebook's users give a resounding "Yes."

The recent uproar over Facebook’s changed terms of service has been significant.

Second, this is a great usage case for its newly introduced polling system that Facebook talked about at Davos. The poll features live results, as seen in the screenshot below, but unfortunately, the user cannot access these results again after they have voted.