I think an option to delete the account gives people more confidence in our service because they know they can leave whenever they want.

For content that you add to S|B like bookmarks and files, we follow the same industry standards as other services.

We do however plan to introduce a backup feature that would safeguard all your content in your cloud in a separate repository. So if one of your connected services should decide to shut down, you would still have a copy in S|B. But this feature introduces so many technical and legal challenges that it is still only on the idea stage.

As for the contest, I have seen Phil’s explanation, obviously, but this comment was sent a little earlier. But I still believe it was not the best decision to change the rules and introduce an additional voting step when people expected to get their prizes.

It is just obvious that people always ask for votes when they are put in any type of competition – I have never believed that Digg promotion can be natural and I have stated it clearly in a recent post on the Digg gaming practices. Everyone will have to game any system when put in a situation when it’s the only choice. This is not the problem, the problem is that SecondBrain chose to get people in the service using this voting system, it just does not make sense because getting people in does not make them use the service unless they have intentions to.

As for the prize itself, at the web 2.0 expo in SF in April I witnessed at least 3 giveaways of MacBook Air – and people only had to leave their business cards to organizers, there was no need to register and account or use any service. To me it is not the question of how cool a prize is, it is the question of sticking to the rules to keep everyone happy, especially SB’s most loyal users – those who chose to participate.

About the contest – I think Phil already explained on your blog the reasons and the rationality behind the voting. I am not sure about the “luring” – I think “rewarding” is a better term. It was clear from the start that the most popular secondbrainiac, with the most interesting collections will win – the question was how to determine popularity. A voting system made sense. That people asked for votes… it’s so normal in social media. I am sure you ask for votes from your readers too when you publish an article on your blog for example – and given the quality of your work, I see no problem in doing so. What I want to say: as long as we all come clean about what we do, there’s no cheating and no luring. In my opinion all Secondbrain users were winners. Too bad that SB didn’t have funds to send us all a MacBook Air. But honestly, Lana, which other company gave away such prizes for people who had nothing more to do than to use SB as they use any other social network?

But they are still new at the game, and I assume they will figure out that they need to do something about this.