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.