Time spend for corporate owned social sites = lost time
I have written about this before and I know I had been right then but I had no real data to back it up. The topic is that if you spend time on social networks or other datacollecting enteties it is very much time better spend somewhere else. You are bound to loose your data and your time at one point or it gets sold to a company that you might be inclined not to support or the company you put all your stuff in turns evil.
But here two examples of late.
First my favorite bookmarking site ma.gnolia.com went down the tubes - they had a unrecoverable data loss - meaning all people spending time there putting their bookmarks up, commenting on them making lovely tags and sharing them in groups with like - minded people have lost everything they did - it happened over night without forewarning. Technical glitch and everything just gone - now you can say this could happen to everyone - but everyone would maybe cared enough about their own data to make a backup of a backup of a backup (and as it happened I made a backup - the first one ever - just one day before saving my bookmarks from doom). While I was lucky there are a LOT of very pissed people out there who lost everything (one person could recover 80 bookmarks out of 80000!). Now the reason I moved to magnolia in the first place was because there was the first round of talks between microsoft and yahoo - microsoft buying all assets of yahoo and de.licio.us the "first" real bookmarking site was bought up by yahoo - needless to say that the last thing I would want is my link collection (nice datamine) in the hands of microsoft.
This could all be put under anectotal evidence if it wouldn´t be for a second event to happen. Apparently google is deleting blog posts of bloggers on their blogger.com network that talk about certain bands. This seems to come from pressure of the RIAA.
From laweekly:
“I’d received the label’s press releases and followed their directions, spending my time and energy to promote their albums,” explains a frustrated Spaulding. “By pulling down my post, they destroyed my intellectual creativity, the very same thing they’re erroneously accusing me of doing. Say someone had linked to that post, or [blog aggregator] Hype Machine — it’s gone completely. If I go into my Blogger table of contents, it’s gone. Not de-published — gone.”
Now I would be sympathetic with this guy but everybody who does not understand that putting your work and time in other peoples hand makes that content fair game for anything should get their hands off the internet asap. Sadly I see even figures that I admire for their advancement in the net in the past blindly following the herds into all the great web2.0 land where the roses are blue and the sky nicely pink with glittery lickable interfaces on top. I think it has to take one of the big social networking sites to go down (and I predict a bankruptcy of myspace or facebook in the coming 12 month) for people to realise that all they have done the last 4+ years was putting their time and energy into the hands of some megacorps that in turn sold their datamines and gave a shit about the actual content published.
The only exception I see here are volatile services that don´t preserve data well in the first place. The glorified chat blabber at Twitter might be one of those services where a loss is not the biggest problem except if you really care about the follower number that you tried to build so hard over the years that could also vanish. Generally it would be very healthy if tribes would find each other and make innertribe services that offer these - often quite mundane and easy to copy - corporate controlled services. And then develop an open in all senses of the word protocol where all these individual services could talk together (web 3.0 proposes the underlying architecture for that by making all content truly portable with nice xml semantic file sent along explaining everything about the data that can be expressed). This would take away a lot of freedom of speech pressure from the net itself because a highly linked but de-central aproach would not be so easy to attack (as in the case of the RIAA suing google f.e. and having a big hit with it because it controls so much data - imagine them having to sue 20.000 sites individually). It would also put an end to the "all these services don´t have a bussiness plan" problem as these services are then under the control of the community which might want to fund them too or has enough volunteers to run them on no dime - also infrastructe would not need to be as massive as with a world wide service - taking also load off the world wide net and localizing things (my guess is that most photos taken that are private photos are also just watched in the same country - yet here we go and save the photos on the other side of the planet on an unknown location and each time when grandpa wants to look at them they are generating traffic around the globe).
There are lots of more positive points to make an re-open the internet and make it tribe based. Otherwise we will all have a facebook Operating System soon because the majority of people wants that (just look at the "task bar" to see that they are working in that direction very clearly).