When I first thought about it, I wondered how we got along before social network sites like Facebook. I then realized that, actually, we got along by way of lots of niche interest sites. The flaw there, at least in my perspective, is that it's a lot harder to branch out and meet new people, something that I didn't start to realize until things Facebook started to open those doors.
But with the announcement today that Pownce was shutting down, something that I never used, by the way, I started to wonder if the overall online social system was fragile. Then, as if tech blogfolk were reading my mind, Om Malik wrote this piece asking if online social media should aggregate or federate. It's all pretty fascinating to me, especially the technical challenges involved.
The problem with a lot of these discussions is that they ignore a bigger reality that transcends technical problems. The first is that someone has to own something. Your stuff has to live somewhere. The second reality is that it costs money, and someone, in one way or another, has to pay for it.
For example, you know why I haven't started using Tumblr? I don't own it. It could disappear tomorrow and all of what I put into it could be gone. Perhaps I'm just a digital pack rat (I have something like 40,000 e-mail messages synced into Gmail by way of IMAP dating back to 1996), but what I choose to post online is very much a history of my life. Perhaps that has no value to anyone but me, but I'd hate to see it disappear.
There are curves the are largely the inverse of each other that describe the relationship between cost and scale, but I'm not sure if they can ever totally meet. For example, in 2001, I had to make my sites a commercial endeavor or they would simply cease to exist. The cost of running them was too great not to ask for money through subscriptions or ads or whatever. Eventually, the hardware and bandwidth came down, and serving a niche like that is no longer a bank-breaking effort. It's still not free, but at least I don't have to charge up credit cards to do it.
That's all well and good for a niche audience, but what happens with the more universal and broad appeal of a Facebook or Digg? Hundreds of servers and staffers have to care and feed for that kind of thing, which absolutely makes it a bona fide business. If the money runs out, we lose all of the intangibles that we put into it.
Like I said, it's fascinating to watch. I'd hate to see anything ever happen to Facebook, because it's the lifeline that keeps me connected to more than ten years of kids I coached, college friends, former co-workers, etc. Even if the level of some of those relationships is relatively superficial, I still value them. God knows many of them help me out professionally. I just hope that someone figures out the answer to where our online social graph lives and how we pay for it.
If I had the attitude you have about Tumblr (It's a good example. I don't care what you use.) then I wouldn't have used CoasterBuzz to create my track record or CampusFish for years to blog.
I would be very upset if Flickr or Facebook didn't exist anymore. I have a lot invested into those sites. The difference between the two is that I pay for one and not the other. I would hope that the free one would be the site to fail.
I suppose that's why I created sites to do this stuff. If I own it, it never goes away! Remember that if you would like your data from here, we can figure that out.
CoasterBuzz has been around too long at this point I think to ever abandon. Going on nine years now! That's an eternity in Internet years.
I couldn't agree more about the Tumblr thing and honestly I never knew exactly why until you just put it into words for me.
Ironically (or maybe not) Tyler was one of the first people I thought of as being on the other side of the fence. I frequent his blog and stuff and have to admit that while I love the way it all works for together (facebook, tumblr, flickr, etc) that I still never felt the need to do the same.
I think I feel the same way as Jeff - it's not mine. Seems a lot like keeping my stuff in a storage unit instead of my own basement or garage. I just can't get comfortable with putting my photos on Flickr or using a third party service to host my blog - even if they are more convenient to use and/or snyc up in really useful and creative ways. I don't want Flickr to have my photos. I want them on coasterimage.com or lordgonchar.com. I don't want to share things on Tumblr, I want to share them on my own terms. Heck, I even feel like I use Facebook a lot less than most of you guys.
I think that's a pretty sure sign that I'm getting old...or at least moving beyond the point where I still do what the cool kids are doing. :)
For my own clarity, I wouldn't be too upset if Flickr went away. I have a copy of every photo up there. I can export all of my Tumblr posts using the API, but haven't yet.
Facebook is the oddball because there isn't a service I can host myself to replace it. I don't care about the photos there or even the conversation. It is the ease of contacting friends that I would miss. But email isn't difficult to use.
There are definitely different categories of content. I don't care about the photos I upload to Facebook or anywhere else, because I too have them all locally (and backed up both in my house and in Amazon's cloud). In the case of Facebook, it's the actual network of people, which is really f'ing strange to describe because it's hard to describe in a platform-neutral way. We don't all have "primary keys" in a universal database to just up and move that elsewhere!
But blog posts, the composition of thoughts into text, that's tricky.
I'll admit that I've been looking at sites like Twitter and Tumblr ... even after previously discounting them. I think there could be some value in a networking sense. (Duh, Walt!)
Maybe that's a bad way to put it. I think I can use it to my advantage, as opposed to using it to tell people where I'm driving or what I ate for dinner.
This article help me understand at least a little of the potential. http://tinyurl.com/5azo5d
I'm not sold yet, but I'm not discounting it either.
The thing is that the average person doesn't have the capacity to create their own sites for this kind of thing. It may make sense to maintain them yourself if you can, but that is not a universal option.
And even still, if you didn't belong to any social network sites beyond your own, how would you get the word out that you even have a blog? To use Gonch's analogy, if the point of having "stuff" to begin with is to put it on display, and arguably that's the point of the blog.... well, whose going to come see it in your garage or basement?
I think as Walt points out, you have to define what your interest in the sites may be and then use them accordingly.
And the bottom line for me is that if I hadn't taken a chance on these types of sites then I wouldn't have met all of you. (ok, I haven't met Walt, but the rest of you.) What I don't want to share I keep off the internet. What I want to preserve that I share I back up on my PC.
Ahhh, damn. Walt & Carrie make good points too and touch on why I gave in to YouTube with the coasterimage videos.
I feel the same way about YouTube in that I just kind of don't see why people want to put videos there rather than their own sites. I noticed my stuff showing up there rather I liked it or not. I figured it couldn't hurt and that I had them on my own site for download anyway. I also figured it was a bigger stage and that I could use it to my advantage.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
Plus, I feel a little dirty when I put my content on another site and generate revenue for them. The only thing that keeps me ok with it is thinking that it pushes traffic my way and in the long run generates revenue for me too.
Lots of little things to consider for me. In the long run, I feel better taking the DIY approach...even if it's not as useful or well done. Maybe it's a pride issue? :)
Video is still very hard to monetize unless you're Hulu, which is why I'll post stuff on YouTube as well. It's not that I'm some old school media guy (well, I am, but accepting of reality as well), but as a content creator, I like to get something for what I do. Like you, I hope people will come back to the source. That, and when you post something like this, your server pipe gets totally slammed.
I've been using YouTube for my videos for KIExtreme for over a year now, for a couple reasons. I DON'T use it to host my video gallery like some sites. I still have a "real" video gallery with good quality downloadable video files.
YouTube is mainly for the viral aspect. Makes it more likely for your videos to get spread around and linked, and could bring some of the ten millions of people on YouTube looking at your site if they're interested.
Also, I upload videos there at the same time I add them to the main video gallery, so from the start there's already a copy on YouTube. People still steal and re-upload them (assholes!) but it seems to happen a lot less now. Also, having a YouTube upload of my own makes it easier to do the DMCA process to have the stolen uploads yanked, since their copyright guys can just look at my upload instead of having to download and check it from my site, like they did before.
Facebook... I've been using that a lot lately. Mainly for the networking. I don't upload primary photos there, only photos I've previously put somewhere else (on my photo blog or gallery), or photos that are just of friends being goofy for the social aspect of it.
The only thing I use FB for "main" photo uploading is for mobile uploads, because my blog platform (LiveJournal) does a craptastic job of mobile uploading. That also ties into wanting to "own" where I put files. Instead of uploading to LJ I host all the images on my server. Mobile uploading creates a bit of a tricky situation with that, since I have yet to find a way to self-host a system that works right for mobile uploading.