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I'm a designer with a geeky tech compusion. I'm Creative Director and Co-Founder of PINGV Creative, which specializes in creative strategy and intera...
 
 
 
 

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Could I have my stuff back, please?

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In the beginning, the world was offline. The past was just what we could remember. Conversations faded. Introductions to others slipped into the realm of unnamed faces and disconnected anecdotes. Jokes were heard and forgotten. Photos bleached out and negative film turned to dust. News clippings crumbled. Documents misplaced were unfindable. Address books lost were irreplaceable. What happened in Las Vegas really did stay in Las Vegas.

Then there was the Internet and all that began to change. The World-Wide Web came to be, and we all became potential publishers. With few exceptions in the larger-business realm, the first websites were no more than billboards. Then they were brochures. Then in the late '90s blogging began. In the '00s, walled-off chatrooms siloed off within services like AOL and Compuserve were replaced by more open communities ... and then social networks. (Walled-off social networks like Facebook opened up into full-blown social networks.) Before we knew it, we were emailing, chatting, shopping, researching, bookmarking, socializing, podcasting, showing videos, sharing, advising, asking, boasting, laughing, crying, raging, raving online.

And as far as we knew, what happened online stayed online ... where we could find it. (And if not, there was always the Wayback Machine.)

In recent weeks, that widespread confidence — complacency? — has been shaken. Maybe it started when it was announced that Facebook was buying Friendfeed.

Robert Scoble himself made noises about quitting Friendfeed. But what to do with all the content he had shared, all the connections he had made there?

I responded thusly:

on Facebook acquisition of Friendfeed

If you don't control it, is it really yours?

When we talk about where the "web" is going, we're asking the wrong question. It's not just about the web, it's about our connections with the people and information in our lives. The rapidly evolving web is but one part of that. We also have to consider things like the ongoing exponential increase in computer power, evolving applications and new apps that leverage that power and the power of the web in new ways, changing social mores, increasing expectations about access, privacy and control of information — not to mention the shifting economic tides and business agendas pursuing what investors are finding the most appealing financially.

The last part is where we find ourselves being led through affordance into new behaviors. Our connections are what marketers are after, because presumably our attention in that context is more valuable to advertisers. And of course there's always the data mining.

We do it gladly because we enjoy the benefits. And because we love experiencing new things that don't seem to be immediately threatening. The payoffs can be enriching, transformative. Thus: Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Gmail, LinkedIn, Google docs, and so on.

So the Facebook/Friendfeed deal got people's attention. Did they really want to leave their conversations, their connections, in the hands of the fickle, unpredictable hands of Facebook?

Then tr.im, the url shortening service, announced that they were shutting down. What would happen to all those link references people had created in tr.im to tweet, plurk, etc.?

Then Twitter was under a DDOS attack and that service was unavailable. The complete inaccessibility period was just a few hours, but the attack continued on and on, disrupting the service sporadically for days on. Many of us saw the strangeness of seeing SMS-generated tweets post days later. Confusing.

For Shelley Powers, designer, developer and photographer, this was all just part of a bigger picture:

I have never liked centralized systems, though I understand their appeal and worth. It always seems, though, that just when you start to depend on the centralized service something happens to it.

Yahoo is now out of the search engine business, and with its new business partnership with Microsoft, its side applications like delicious are now vulnerable. I've managed to replace delicious with Scuttle, though I no longer have the social aspect of delicious. However, my Scuttle implementation does an excellent job with bookmarks, which is what I needed.

Then NewsGator sent an email around this last week telling all of us that our NewsGator feed aggregator is being replaced by Google Reader. I don't like Google Reader. More importantly, I really don't want to give Google yet more information about me. So, I replaced my NewsGator/NetNewsWire installation with a Gregarius implementation. It took me some time to get used to the new user interface, and I've had

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Tre - 5 pts

laura ....bravo...your post sooo sums up a lot that i've been concerned about but haven't had the words to say.

elisa...do you know about cotweet? it's a way to archive your tweets. i'm learning it.....

that and the rss feed for tweets. also learning that too.

but in the short term..i save/favorite every tweet i think i may want some day...

anyting i want to share ...ive post to friend feed and then that connects to my facebook and twitter.

i may start to use netvibes but for now my rss subscriptions go to feedly and anything 'new' i find from tweets that i want to also share i do via friend feed.

but there's surely way more links i'm getting via tweets that i don't have time to save and archive and read later.

overall:

a. i need a strategy to do what you're pointing out laura: have whatever content i'm creating whether as posts or comments be saveable somehow....

b. and i need a better system for saving/archiving and reading later stuff.

i agree w/ that part of the post that talks about owning own domain...set that up after blogher 2007....thoughtbythought.net..but only when my gmail was hacked (and elisa thank goodness knew better than to think i was kidnapped and asking for thousands of dollars ransom from sierra leone) alerted me to this...that's when i created email on my domain.

but i point this to read it thru gmail's interface b/c i got used to it.

what email interface do you all use? prefer?

there's soo much i don't know (ie: laura...i have heard of drupal and intentica but haven't ever used them yet.

 if i've learned anything in one year of self instruction its dive in and use the tools and create your strategy as you go and be open not to stick with it for too long.

 but having said that, i'm also much more wise now. i don't try to read every rss subscription or every link....my new recent goal is to comment at least 1x week on folks who i care about and have a connection with  and then share and retweet as much as i'm able....and somehow thru it all keep trying to build community.

when twitter and facebook froze a few weeks ago, how fabulous was it that blogher was up and blogher chatter was F I N E :)

love that we have a steady base here.

laura is there a blogher group that's set up to continue the geek lab from the conference..kinda like an ongoing geek lab on blogher? could there be elisa? 

i would absolutely contribute and participate.

thanks again for all all of you do...i learn from each of you so so much.

Tre~

tw:   @tresha

fb:    http://facebook.com/treshathorsen

e:     tre@thoughtbythought.net

blog: http://thoughtbythought.net

Candelaria Silva 5 pts

I have recently been unfriending on FaceBook.  I got caught up in the madness but swiftly uncaught when I realized I had accepted "faceships" w people who I really didn't want to know my bizness.  Also scarred by friends, a daughter and a husband who like to upload photos from our archives and current events. 

Centralized services are efficient but, as you've explained so well, have so many negatives.  In nature there is a cycle of life, death, rebirth.  The invention of plastic violated that basic natural cycle so we have this stuff we can't get rid of.  Same thing with memory - some stuff should be let go, unremembered.  I can't even articulate this but I shudder when I think of the dominance and desired supremacy internet based companies like Facebook want.

Thanks for this post.

http://blog.candelarisilva.com ( http://blog.candelarisilva.com/ )

Good and plenty!

Laura Scott 5 pts

Ryan Calo of Stanford Center for Internet and Society points to ( http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6241 ) a Facebook quiz on Facebook quizzes, by the ACLU. It's worth a look.

Laura Scott, BlogHer Contributing Editor, Tech/Web
design ( http://pingv.com ), snap ( http://scatteredsunshine.com ), blog ( http://rarepattern.com ), tweet ( http://twitter.com/lauras )

Laura Scott 5 pts

Those can be aggravatingly elusive to search. Maybe that's a good thing.

Laura Scott, BlogHer Contributing Editor, Tech/Web
design ( http://pingv.com ), snap ( http://scatteredsunshine.com ), blog ( http://rarepattern.com ), tweet ( http://twitter.com/lauras )

Laura Scott 5 pts

A Drupal site could aggregate everything you do that has an RSS feed. The hard part is exporting all the connections, the relationships. I'm not sure these various services would even consider that information yours.

Laura Scott, BlogHer Contributing Editor, Tech/Web
design ( http://pingv.com ), snap ( http://scatteredsunshine.com ), blog ( http://rarepattern.com ), tweet ( http://twitter.com/lauras )

Laura Scott 5 pts

Identi.ca is open source, and integrates with Twitter quite nicely. But it still is centralized, and hosted on underpowered servers (at least in the 2 weeks or so I've been trying it). But ultimately the "social" outweighs the architecture of the "network" doesn't it? Even people who hate Facebook or Twitter are there because that's where everyone else is.

Laura Scott, BlogHer Contributing Editor, Tech/Web
design ( http://pingv.com ), snap ( http://scatteredsunshine.com ), blog ( http://rarepattern.com ), tweet ( http://twitter.com/lauras )

Gena Haskett 6 pts

I never wanted to do Facebook and now due to certain recent privacy intruding incidents I really don't want to go near the joint.

I have to make decisions about what I put online. I know it can and will affect future employment options. Make no mistake, it is easier to use a blog post to dismiss a candidate than to cite an ageism reason.

I try to be remain aware but I am human, I do have that selective memory. There is a post or comment I said in anger that will bite me hard in the future.

So yes, open source community, if you build it and give me the option of opting out and saving my stuff I will come.

Might even pay for it.

The irony is that I found your post via Twitter.

Gena - Out On The Stoop ( http://outonthestoop.blogspot.com )

Elisa Camahort 5 pts

...to develop an app that would regularly back up my blog posts...text and images and formatting...into some kind of file I could control and maintain.

The idea was not only to back it up in case a service I used ever closed, but my thought was also to be able to export an an entire blog from one service, say the antiquated iBlog I use for my personal blog ( http://homepage.mac.com/elisa_camahort/iblog ), to another service.

I think there would be a market for such an app. I'd pay something for that app. But i still don't think it exists...does it?

I also think Laurie White pointed me at one point to a service that records and saves your tweets...trying to remember the name. Given how badly twitter Search sux, i probably should check that out. But it's of limited value...I can't proactively save what I don't realize exists...you still need good search to find what you want to save (that isn't your own, of course.)

Or I could just stay in happy denial about how much I rely on these technologies and services.

La la la.

Elisa Camahort Page
BlogHer
elisa@blogher.com

My BlogHer profile ( http://www.blogher.com/haystackprofile/viewprofile... ) truly shows you everything I do online...Check it out!!

Vered 5 pts

People ask me why I don't "open up more" in social media, and I answer that social media is NOT like chatting in real life, because unlike talking face to face, it gets archived forever. So being cautious and reserved totally makes sense to me, even if it means my tweets are boring! 

----

Need to hire a blogger ( http://momgrind.com/ )? I’m a mommy blogger and a blogger for hire ( http://momgrind.com/hire-me/ ).

Virginia DeBolt 5 pts

Post, Laura.

"If you don't control it, is it really yours?" sums it up so well.

Virginia DeBolt
BlogHer CE ( http://www.blogher.com/blog/virginia-debolt )
Web Teacher ( http://www.webteacher.ws/ )
First 50 Words ( http://first50.wordpress.com/ )