Spaghetti Testing | Peter Smith

At the end of March, the US federal government’s General Services Administration (GSA) signed memoranda of understanding with four well known social sites: YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo and blip.tv.

Well, as seen in this list of the Terms of Service Agreements from the US government’s Web Content Managers Forum, there are now many more sites and services included:

• AddThis: Agreement and Instructions
• Blip.tv: Agreement and Instructions
• Blist.com: Agreement and Instructions
• Facebook: Agreement and Instructions
• Flickr: Agreement and Instructions
• MySpace: Agreement and Instructions
• Slideshare: Agreement and Instructions
• Twitter: Agreement and Instructions
• Vimeo: Agreement and Instructions
• YouTube: Agreement and Instructions

Click through the links above to get to PDFs of the agreements that have been negotiated.

I really like the fact that a service like AddThis has been cleared for US government agencies to work with. Empowering your site visitors to easily and quickly share your content is really important if you want your digital communications to remain relevant. Also shows a willingness to use what’s out there rather than reinventing the wheel — often the temptation is to develop a “government” version of something successful like this, which is pretty darned inefficient.

By the way, Twitter is not actually on the list. Here’s what it says at the other end of that link above:

Regarding Twitter, several federal agency attorneys (including attorneys at GSA and The White House) have determined that there are no issues with Twitter’s standard Terms of Service that would present legal problems for their agencies. For this reason, we are not negotiating any special Terms of Service with Twitter, and are simply “checking the box” for the standard Terms of Service when setting up a Twitter account.

This is what had been originally reported back in March as well.

I will also revise what I said when I originally blogged about these agreements:

I see this as a really positive step. It’s something that US public servants can point to in their efforts to reassure their managers and executives that it’s OK  for government to be on these major platforms. This will make it easier to go to where online audiences actually are.

We need the same kind of thing here — PWGSC and other central agencies are you listening? (Time to get on the phone to your counterparts in the GSA and ask them to share their templates!) [Time to start downloading those agreements and using them as a base for GoC use!]

(found via the Government Information Division blog)