Spread Thin
In some ways I don't like being spread broadly around the web, in the sense that all of the content I use is hosted all over the place at a number of sites.
I'm not even a prolific creator of content. I don't take as many photos these days, I don't record video, and I rarely find time to write new blog entries. What I do have: blog entries on nuttnet (which is really LimeSpot), tweets on twitter, photos on flickr, old entries on livejournal, a single video on youtube, stuff behind the facebook walled garden, and other content that I can't even remember posting.
One of the topics heavily under discussion at the past few conferences I've attended is the idea of personal content ownership. The current model for startups is to build a service, attract users, and let those users post their own content which attracts more users. Once the cycle repeats a few times network effects start to kick in and the site takes off. Some sites have attempted to address the discrepancy between users providing the content and sites selling ads by offering revenue sharing programs, but I think the possibly more important issue is user control.
When I press the "publish" button for this post, where does it go? Perhaps I want to also publish it on another site. Plain text is fairly unique in that you can copy and paste your way to your post's freedom, but right now LimeSpot only really offers two ways to see a post: displayed in rendered form in my blog, and in the RSS feed. Take something more abstract, such as adding a user as a friend: does the social networking site "own" that piece of data that says we are friends? Should it?
I used to think that having control of my data meant being able to move it to my own website, on my hosting provider. So how is that any different than leaving a video on YouTube? Since my hosting provider allows me to run applications, I can create any interface I like for retrieving data. But what if a website (say, LimeSpot) could provide the same flexibility? It would be like a hosting provider that had a bunch of reasonable defaults for retrieving data, but allowed you to come up with your own if you wanted.
By "retrieving data" I mean a number of different things: perhaps you want to segregate your different types of content and have a separate blog, list of videos, photos, etc. Perhaps you want a big list twitter/pownce-style of everything you're doing online. Maybe you want to see everything you're doing mixed in with everything your friends are doing. Maybe you want to write your own API for retrieving your data.
Obviously there are disadvantages of all of a user's data actually living in a centralized place. Sites like twitter and youtube are popular because of the sense of community people have with other people on the site. I'd much rather pull in data to LimeSpot than have it hosted there.
This idea isn't a catch-all solution by any means. I didn't even link to my livejournal site because it is rarely updated and probably embarassing. Some information needs to stay separate, but it should be the user's choice, not the site owner's.
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