SO Facebook filed a patent for crowd translation (picked up from Techcrunch)
This is just odd odd odd. It seems an almost LinkedIn loss of vision when it comes to the crowd and a betrayal of why so many people helped.
I think and hope there is a lot of backlash about this development. There are two big challenges I see with it:
1) Facebook now wants to find additional profit in what people did for free to benefit their global communities (not to give Facebook another USD stream for)
2) You can not say you believe in world peace and then attempt to stop everyone else from trying to do it too.
Crowdsourcing at the masses level is driven my a commitment to the humanitarian goal of human development – this may well be expressed in much smaller ways by us as individuals – but rolled up it is about getting a world to talk to each other and find out that the vast majority of us are actually reasonable people. Facebook was a lighthouse to this movement – a win win, they developed a great process for sure, they empowered their community and crowdsourcing in a way no one else had based on the visibility they garnered – further more they deserved every new global member they got. But surely trying to patent that and make sure no one else can empower the global crowd in the same way crosses a line that betrays the spirit of what was achieved?
