Over the past week we have seen FriendFeed bought out by FaceBook and tr.im coming close to folding.
Users are investing a lot of time and effort building social networks and getting their content onto various third-party sites – never really knowing if all that hard work will be undone after an acquisition or a provider going broke.
Understandably, the question a lot of people are now asking is; “who or what can I trust?”
We can trust ourselves!
I saw an interesting post on ReadWriteWeb about one theory; which is that we self-host our own social network and media sharing. They speak about a “wordpress.org-type version of Twitter.”
This may sound a little crazy, but a self-hosted open source platform would instantly solve a few really common issues.
Think about it.
Firstly, it would ensure that your information remains ‘live’ for as long as you want it to. Secondly, it would remove all those privacy concerns, which many people have regarding how their content is handled on sites like FaceBook. It would also stop the often insane account suspensions that Twitter is becoming renowned for.
What do you think?
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Good post.
What about people who are forced out of services like twitter, coz of the sponsored messages and spam?
I spent fricking ages building a following and ended up leaving.
Wasted all that effort.
You are going to see a lot more sponsored tweets shortly.
Just noticed yet another sponsored tweets company. These guys have chris pirillo sending ads to his followers.
It’s gonna piss a lot of people off.
I have to ask about logistics. While an open-source twitter feed seems cool, the site is also an aggragator of sorts with a metric for measuring success.
It would mean a type of RSS system for the life feeds with a kind of feedburner for measuring your followers/subscribers/friends and seeing their content. Do you exchange feeds, subscribe to select ones, etc. And how do you go about “retweets” and “direct messages.”
Of course, it would also be easier to block a lot of the spam. While I’m sure some will setup websites with ads for this (just as there are ad plugins for wordpress) I suppose so many bots won’t be around.
Personally, I’d just like to see a 3rd party stand up and say “we’re doin’ it our way!” and build a real social media community – with emphasis on the “social” part. If all else fails, I may build one myself! :P
Corey,
The success metric measure could equally be displayed on a self hosted site. Think of how RSS subscribers can be shown and the various chicklets that people use?
The best measure of any network’s ‘success’ is it’s value to the people who use it. That’s harder to measure.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, especially with all the hub-bub over namespaces. Why do we need namespaces when we can have our own websites? Sure you can find me on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Friendfeed, etc. But why go through all that when you can get what you need from scottpantall.com?
The best thing about having my own site? I can share what I want, when I want, how I want it.
Scott,
You make a good point. The cost of self-hosting is pretty low too – so there’s not the same price barrier their used to be either. A lot of the tools we need can be mashed-up from a wordpress.org blog and some social media / sharing plug-ins. It’s not ideal, but maybe with some added functionality it ‘could’ be an answer.
Yikes – sounds like you may need to have some technical skills here?? Even basic (easy) plug-ins and html can be very difficult for some of us, dah… However, sounds like a probable future option to me.
I think there’s no reason why the software needs to be clunky or hard to use.
I have a friend who teaches people, who have no tech ability, how to do the basics on a wordpress blog. He says that after an hour’s tuition, most people know enough to get started. Then, they can learn the more complex stuff (if they want to) slowly as their confidence grows.