Zeldman has written a great post entitled “The vanishing personal site“, in it he expresses his concerns on how we are publishing less and less posts on our personal blogs, and instead outsourcing the publication of our personal content to the money making online services like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, who are receiving more and more traffic that should be going to our personal sites.
I’ve recently realised I now check my Twitter profile page more frequently than my Facebook profile, a service I thought I would never get that into. I look at people’s twitter updates before I visit their personal blogs. That’s if I visit their blogs at all.
It’s so much easier to write a 140 character tweet and send it from my mobile, or through my chat program, but why don’t we spend those extra couple minutes publishing personal statements on our personal blogs. Who said our blog posts have to be longer than 140 characters?
What happens in eighty years time, when our grand children are researching the family tree, and Twitter is no longer around, nor all our tweets. Facebook have installed tracking chips in our necks and joined forces with the FBI and stored all our personal details in a secret vault 2 kilometers underground.
Sure they are not going to give two hoots about Vernon Koekemoer in 2008, but perhaps they’ll be interested in reading what I did for a living, and some of the nonsense I wrote. All in one place, not legally owned by some company, and not riddled across the internet.
3 responses
Good point Mark, that why I’ve been using my blog as my main source and syndicating it to other services such as Facebook(via RSS notes) etc.
mmm… I remember commenting on a post from Aquila late last year about exactly this – facebook killing blogs, and I’ve been guilty of same… being more active on social media sites like facebook rather than publishing content to my personal site.
truly sad.
It’s because these popular sites put in more work than we do. By letting the geeks paid by Google, Facebook, Twitter and Plurk worry about usability, we save some time in the short run but lose, potentially, our own content, our privacy, and control over the container it’s presented in, in the long run.
But we’re too stubborn to admit that giving our home-grown admin panels some TLC will indeed make us more likely to use them on a daily basis.
Mindlessly simply point-and-click functionality, a friendly colour scheme, one-click syndication to other services… these things need not be the hallmarks of popular services. Relish the challenge of competing against those armies of developers and designers bought and paid for with advertising dollars paid in exchange for data on us.