Adora + yahoo = no, originally uploaded by Lisa Brewster.

Screenshot from my recent banning from Yahoo Live, presumably for violating their TOS due to indecency (I was broadcasting from my bathtub). However, if you view this on Flickr and check the note I added, you will see that this clearly could not have been the case.

Greg Cohn, Director of Market Strategy and Business Developement for Yahoo!, responds on the matter:

Obviously, your head and shoulders are tortuous and defamatory to the highest degree. I will advise our tortuousness review team to keep an eye out for you and your known aliases.

I sincerely hope that the tortuousness review team decides to investigate my case further. I wait with baited breath for their response.

About the author: Lisa Brewster is a project manager and startup advisor in San Diego, CA. Subscribe to this blog by RSS or email, or follow me on Twitter for more updates.

On Wednesday, adult social networking startup Zivity sent out a notification to their beta testers that they could now buy additional votes if they’re not satisfied with the 5 included with their monthly $10 membership.  Extra votes cost $1 each in packs of 5 and follow their existing payment distribution system where 80% of each vote goes directly to the artists (60 cents to the model and 20 cents to the photographer). 

But what I find so shocking about this new feature is their decision to process payments with PayPal, the bane of every adult webmaster’s existence since they imposed new rules on mature content in 2003.   From their Acceptable Use Policy:

PayPal prohibits transactions for all sexually oriented digital goods. Digital goods include downloaded pictures or videos, subscriptions to websites, or other content delivered through a digital medium.

Clear-cut regarding digital content, but what PayPal doesn’t provide is a straightforward definition of "sexually oriented."  Just about everyone I know in this industry has their own horror story of closed accounts and frozen funds with only a fuzzy idea of what part of the policy they violated.  From my *ahem* personal experience, exposed breasts and suggestive poses are definitely enough to get an account frozen. Adult webmasters fully understand that even in the more tasteful side of this business there is a much higher rate of chargebacks (aka getting caught by the wife), so more rules and higher fees are a fact of life.  But with PayPal’s fickle moral standards, even the most respectable artists are constantly left wondering where they stand.

Zivity’s response to my inquiry on this matter was that they have an excellent relationship with PayPal, but they didn’t offer any other details on communication that they’d had to establish that excellent relationship.  We all know that "Zivity isn’t porn," so let’s hope that message got to PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy team, too.

Ever find yourself wanting to tell the world the more naughty side of what you’re doing in 140 characters or less?  Or in this case perhaps a picture really is worth a thousand words.  Boobik is off to a pretty decent start with both IM and SMS integration for text updates, but pics and videos can only be uploaded via the web interface for the time being. Expect this site to explode once mobile uploads are implemented.

At this point there are still way more sweaty onlookers than folks who you’d consider hooking up with for a keyboard rattling cyber session, but guess what?  The site is live now, so no begging for a pesky beta invite.