Great post yesterday from The Blasphemous Bicycler about people not controlling their own data:
The reasons for this are fairly easy to deduce. We were all swept away by “social media.” To send a tweet, update your Facebook status, or post a picture of your victuals on Instagram is a trivial task. Composing a blog entry requires a modicum of thought, and at least several minutes of your attention. So, in abject laziness, we abandoned our duties as Jeffersonian Yeoman bloggers, and became digital sharecroppers, churning out content for Mark Zuckerberg and his Hamiltonian ilk.
I’ve recently been twittering a bit, just to see what the Guardian’s on about in their four daily articles about how brilliant Twitter is, and I think I’ve figured it out: it’s actually complete rubbish. It’s a cross between an IM system and a never-ending “quote of the day” competition, and the former of those is the one we need — and it’s perfectly well fulfilled by Jabber etc.
The big advantage, of course, of the big social media sites is that everyone’s there. But there is another funky-groovy technology that is massively widespread, easy to use, and also permits you to own your own data: it’s called the internet.