You might ask, why do I need Facebook or Twitter or whatever? And you would be correct to think that you probably don’t if you do not care about reaching out and engaging an audience. More importantly an audience that wants to read your information because they subscribed to have it show up in their feed, just like you may be reading this article.
Back quite a while ago, the promise of feed syndication was something complicated that probably scared a lot of people. But it is the modern solution to decentralize ourselves from the group think that we have been exposed to by the likes of the social media giants. Start your own blog, host it yourself, it’s cheap enough to do. The problem comes with engagement. What platform does the metadata of likes, views, and comments get used? How many logins do you need to deal with news and blogs and friends postings. Twitter was called a microblogging service at one time. Now it’s just free form open texting at best.
We like our walled gardens. But all walled gardens eventually give way to the next big thing. If you’ve been around long enough, you watched them all fall, from Fidonet, AOL, eWorld, IRC, MySpace, and so on… the only constant is change.
Apple has a chance to create a metadata “safe space” because of the user base it has, and it’s direct os for mobile and long term use of RSS. How serious are they about security these days? But they could decentralize the Social Network space. Google tried many times and have not been very successful in their Social Offerings.
I worry about the Narrowing of voices. People being banned on different networks, government regulations restricting free speech, and the obscuring of facts by people unaware how they are being marketed to.
Do not take your privacy and freedom for granted. The chance to get it back once the cat is out of the bag is not very good. Most people are out of some bag, but who knows how far it will go, or what it could mean? Such as insurance, jobs, etc… who knows, or worse yet, wholesale monitoring of people bypassing our 4th Amendment rights.
We do need Social Media to stay in touch with our network of friends and colleagues. What we don’t need is companies exposing our person data for financial gain.