LinkedIn introduces new set of collaboration tools

Issue with these new collaboration tools is that the Terms of Use simply allow ANY content added to the space to be used by LinkedIn in any way they see fit. Where's the commercial in confidence or non-disclosure clauses?

From their site "License and warrant your submissions: You do not have to submit anything to us, but if you choose to submit something (including any user generated content, ideas, concepts, techniques and data), you must grant, and you actually grant by concluding the Agreement, a non-exclusive, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual, unlimited, assignable, sublicenseable, fully paid up and royalty-free right to us to copy, prepare derivative works of, improve, distribute, publish, remove, retain, add, and use and commercialize, in any way now known or in the future discovered, anything that you submit to us, without any further consent, notice and/or compensation to you or any third parties. By submitting any information to us, you represent and warrant that such submission is accurate to your best knowledge, not confidential, and not in violation of any contractual restrictions or other third party rights. LinkedIn exercises no control over any content you or others submit when using LinkedIn. Note that we describe our current practices related to personally identifiable information collected through LinkedIn in our Privacy Policy and that we may update our policies and practices from time to time at our sole discretion."

Interesting Murray. Thanks for pointing this out. I'm going to contact LinkedIn about this and get back to you with what they say. Could be standard boiler plate language that they will change as soon as they realize the implications. Otherwise, as you say, it's a big obstacle. Thanks again for the comment.

Ron

The problem with the folks like Google & Yahoo is that they have created many tools which have been loosely coupled. The challenge with such a solution is that the the information gets locked into multiple silos. With Google Wave they are trying to integrate all the conversations (discussions) but what would be truly desirable is a platform built form ground up using social networking at the base and business apps on top of it. I have tried Injoos Teamware (www.injoos.com) and found it captures both informal and formal knowledge like documents in one single workspace on the cloud.