Blimey – things happen at lightening speed in this world. No sooner had the digital ink gone dry on my post about terapad than Stephan Tual – owner of the company behind the service was on the phone. In essence he was saying I was looking at the wrong Ts & Cs and copyright information. I pointed out I couldn’t be because they were there in front of me on screen as we spoke.
Stephan then directed me to the Ts & Cs that appear once users have signed up for the service. These are much more like it and are directed to those who see your terapad site. See in particular the copyright notice that appears on your terapad site. But that didn’t resolve the problem because the offending service terms show up as you sign up for the service. That represents a deal between you as site owner and terapad as service operator.
20 minutes later and all’s well. Potential users CAN safely sign up, knowing they’re not giving anything up of value to the service operator.
Stephan freely admits this was a mistake that didn’t get picked up when the service was going through its final pre-launch phase and that he doesn’t want to own ANY of your terapad data. The only thing he retains rights over are your sign up identity which is for possible advertising purposes plus his own proprietary code – which is fair enough.
I don’t mind that because I can always ignore or filter out unwanted or irrelevant adverts. Others might but I think in this day and age, most people are smart enough to filter out where appropriate.
Phew…now back to the main thrust I would have written had I not looked closer at the time.
The service is more expensive than equivalents like TypePad but there is real value beyond the blog element. The pain of handling scary widgets and dragging in snippets of code to do things like PayPal etc has already been taken care of. The service still allows you to add in code but it’s not necessary to get a good start to producing an e-commerce enhanced blog. Like Neville, I’m concerned about trackback but less so than he because I have seen trackback misused too many times.
Yes – some features are missing, like Feedburner integration but that’s a minor point to me. What I’d really like to see is terapad integrated to something like Freshbooks or Blinksale. That way I’m not restricting my billing options for online operations while still retaining the collection option of PayPal. Even so, it’s a smart piece of innovation
Thanks for listening Stephan – great to see someone respond so rapidly and in such a positive manner.
That’s what 21st century customer service is all about.
Technorati Tags: Blinksale, FreshBooks, terapad, SaaS
