Linked: Community Services

via Waffle & Brent Simmons:

Eventually, communities moved from BBSes and newsgroups to forums, email, chats and instant messaging. But at some point, it became “social media”, and forms of media turned into products. And this isn’t just Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, it goes as far back as del.icio.us, Flickr and Yahoo Groups.

The reason I don’t like social media is that it takes two things that are polar opposites and duct tapes them together. Your own utility – to save links, to write text, to move files or materials, to keep notes, to communicate with yourself in the future, to communicate with some other specific people – and the social media outlet’s desire to fulfil its own objectives first.

This is a recipe for tone-deafness at best. But it’s also an explanation of why so many people are so uneasy with social media.

and from Brent:

My blog’s older than Twitter and Facebook, and it will outlive them. It has seen Flickr explode and then fade. It’s seen Google Wave and Google Reader come and go, and it’ll still be here as Google Plus fades. When Medium and Tumblr are gone, my blog will be here.

The things that will last on the internet are not owned. Plain old websites, blogs, RSS, irc, email.

I remain vigilant on maintaining my independent presence on the web. I own the formatting, the database, the design, the ‘about me’ page (BTW, it’s horribly outdated) and I curate what I want to show to the world. I like that both bloggers are making examples of Web 1.0 products more than the 2.0 products we have today. My linked category on this blog will out live Del.icio.us for sure! The only service I haven’t divested of in my life is Flickr and Google Voice. Flickr is very challenging. I simply don’t have the CPU & Storage to serve up photos. My Flickr albums have been viewed over 3.1 million times since 2005..on average, I get 3-5 thousand views a day of my Flickr photos. I can’t support that with my own server.