I have been thinking a lot about my online presence over the past few weeks. I am always quick to jump on board and try the latest beta services and have embraced quite a few longterm including Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr.
When I saw the demise of tr.im and the acquisition of FriendFeed by Facebook, I began to question whether it was wise to produce content on services like these that could completely vanish tomorrow. If Flickr goes down, I’m not too concerned as I have the digital negatives tucked away in iPhoto. At most I’ll lose the photo comments, a few tags and maybe the time I invested in curating my sets there. If Twitter, however, were to fade away, the loss would be even steeper. In many ways, my Twitter account has been my personal homepage for the past three years. It is a historical archive of what has happened in my life both personally and professionally.
Like skinny jeans and mustaches, blogging as a platform is about to have a resurgence thanks in part to the realization that third-party social media services do have a finite existence. The content you put in data silos like FriendFeed and Twitter is only good so long as those services remain relevant and in business. I’m certain I’m not the only one uncomfortable with that.
I don’t necessarily care that my shortened URLs are lost in space and I wasn’t more than a casual FriendFeed user, but I can imagine how frustrating it must be for the heavy users to know that they invested years into a platform that will most likely die off as the engineering talent is ingested into Facebook.
In a way I feel that way with delicious. I’ve posted thousands of links to the service in hopes that it would one day grow, but since its acquisition by Yahoo, the service has for the most part faltered. In its present state, delicious offers very little over searching Google for the link or posting about it on this very site.
Twitter is the same way in some respects. I’ve composed over 6500 tweets, but sifting through the archive of them is nearly impossible given Twitter’s search limitations. I post to Twitter because it’s a great way to interact with colleagues and friends, but also because I see it as a quick way to document my life. I want to be able to look back at things I tweeted in 2007 and remember what was happening in my life around that time.
Perhaps even more frustrating is the issue of pictures posted on Twitter. I have several dozen photos appended to tweets that are hosted on TwitPic, yFrog and various other third-party platforms that I doubt will be around when I hit my 30th birthday.
As I wrote back in May, microblogging services like Twitter, Tumblr and Frienfeed have become outlets for content that would previously have been fodder for a blog post. Instead of linking to a great blog post by a colleague, it’s posted to the Twitter stream or to delicious. One thousand word essays on the failures of AppStore or a great new piece of software are now summarized in 140 characters.
What tr.im, FriendFeed and Twitter have reminded me is that I should focus more time and effort into platforms of my own creation and control, like this site. For the first time in a long while I feel the desire to create more content for my own site rather than elsewhere. I can sleep well at night knowing that what I do create here will last for my lifetime rather than the lifetime of the latest Silicon Valley startup.
I started carpeaqua back in January of 2003 when blogging was just starting to gain popularity. There was no iPhone. There was no Twitter. Over six years later, I am confident that no one is going to offer to buy me out or that this site will ever join the technology deadpool.
