A few weeks ago there was quite some uproar on the change in the Terms of Services from Facebook.

Amanda French compares the TOS of Facebook with the one of MySpace, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Linkedin seems to have quite a strong Terms of Service-statement: in fact, when you upload something (photos, ideas, your profile,…) you grant them the “right [...] 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 to any third parties.”

Twitter seems to have the most “user-friendly” TOS:

1. We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any text and images you have stored in the system.

2. We encourage users to contribute their creations to the public domain or consider progressive licensing terms.

If you are still in doubt whether you can trust “those social media”-sites, then maybe it’s a good idea to consider open source social networking.

Inshoshi calls itself a product and a project. The product aims to be the best open-source social networking platform. The project is to make the product! Inshoshi tries to build the code to be able to “install” and further develop your own social networking site.

LovedByLess is a similar project and seems to be finished already. Both seem to be good tools to work third party-independent.

This week I came across two great examples that perfectly match with the title of this blog: Social Textiles! They combine social media with clothes; more in particular with T-shirts!

Firstly there is the Facebook application, Status king which makes it possible to order T-shirts with  some basic Facebook information about yourself printed on: more in particular your Facebook status, user picture and how long ago you’ve updated your status. So if you want to let  know “what are you doing right now?” in a non-digital way!

But if you say: I’m not so a Facebook-fan. I’m more into Twitter, than I have some very good news for you! Similar to the Facebook application there is a service, called TWitoShirt which displays your tweets on a shirt, exactly as it appears on the web; so not only the message is printed, but also the username, user picture and the time that has elapsed. An additional feature is that you can also customize the size and colours.

Source: Mashable, Status king, TWitoShirt

Katrien already wrote on the perils of using Facebook. I now found an interesting work on using Facebook for activism. On the site of DigiActive, a volunteer organization dedicated to helping grassroots activists around the world use the Internet and mobile phones to increase their impact, you can find “Introduction to Facebook Activism” written by Dan Schultz.

Because of its massive user base and the free applications one can create and install Facebook is too interesting to ignore. This small guide (its only 15 pages long) contains some pro & cons of Facebook activism, a practical guide for setting up activists events and three examples of Facebookactivism: Monk’s protst in Burma, Help Fouad Campaign from Morocco and the Free Kareem Campaign from Egypt.

The most interesting content is off course the analysis of these three different campaigns as it gives an insight on how a sometimes spontaneous action evolves into a massivley supported cause on Facebook and what problems and questions could then pop up (for example, the lack of anonimity in these sometimes dangerous campaigns).

Download Introduction to Facebook Activism (pdf)

Source: DigiActive

Nowadays, everybody is on Facebook. Recent cases have prooved that a Facebook-profile, that shows too much personal information, can get you in trouble. For instance, everybody remembers the case of Kevin Doyle, who called in sick after a night on the town. No problem if he didn’t post on Facebook that he had a hangover … and of course his boss could read it!

Sometimes the average Facebook-uses has to think twice before posting more personal information online. Since not everyone has good intentions and can be trusted. An illustrative example is the tragic case of Emma Forrester. She was killed by her soon to be ex-husband Wayne, after spreading the news on Facebook that she was single again and looking forward to meet other men. Although she removed him as a friend, he could still read the posts on the pages of mutual friends.

But also criminals make use of your personal information on Facebook. Maybe one of your six hundred friends isn’t that trustworthy as you want to believe. So when you are counting the days to leave on a skiing trip, he is also counting the days to drop by your house and leave with that brand new 65-inch television set. So a useful tip: don’t publish your address on the info-page! And beware of the Koobface-virus, that currently is harassing Facebook-users with e-mails that contain a link to a  video site that appears to contain a movie.  The video, however, doesn’t play, and the user is asked to update the video software by downloading a file. It’s this download that contains the virus!

But not only criminals use Facebook as a source for vital information. According to an article in the Flemish newspaper ‘De Standaard’, Belgian tax inspectors are also using Facebook to find out more information. For every file, they start with googling that person. And if they have a Facebook-account, the tax inspector invites him or her to become a friend, building on the fact that people get addicted to friendships and want to have as many as friends as possible. In this way, the tax inspector receives crucial information of the lifestyle of that particular person and can check if it corresponds with his declaration.

So the next time, you want to post pictures of the brand new BMW and your latest holidays in the Carribian … think again!

Source: De Standaard, 13 december 2008, p. 14

A new year is around the corner … the perfect time for overviews and lists the summarize the past year. Also search engine Google just published the yearly Zeitgeist- report. With this Google want to reveal a certain zeitgeist (the spirit of the times) by analysing the millions of search queries people daily insert.

Most populair search queries were: ‘Sarah Palin’, ‘Beijing 2008′ and social media sites like Facebook, Tuenti and Wer kennt wen.