DMGWalled Gardens, Blogging
I've been thinking for a while about social networking on the web, and how the vast majority of my contact with friends over the web happens via email and blogs. I have a MySpace page, but I rarely use it, and don't like spending time there. About the only time I visit is when someone invites me to be their friend.
I used to post regularly on Kuro5hin, but left when the place got overrun by trolls and all the cool kids fled to Hushi. That brought home an important message: what you post on someone else's site belongs to them. One of these days I'll write a perl script to extract all my diary entries and install them here, but that's definitely a "copious free time" kind of goal.
Scoop, which runs Kuro5hin, is by far my favorite forum software ever. But even that comes a distant, distant second to blogs. Why? Because anyone can have their own blog, and the only necessary point of integration is a permalink. Once each post has a distinct URL, anyone, anywhere, can link to it.
Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror said it really well:
I feel very strongly that we already have the world's best public social networking tool right in front of us: it's called the internet. Public services on the web, such as blogs, twitter, flickr, and so forth, are what we should invest our time in. And because it's public, we can leverage the immense power of internet search to tie it all-- and each other-- together.
I absolutely agree. All the tools he talks about go out of their way to play well with others. I'm especially impressed that Twitter offers JSON formatted info through its API.
The common thread running through Flickr, blogs, Twitter, etc. is their openness. And that's what MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. lack.
The same way that understanding the economics of your business produces radically different approaches to product development which in turn result in subtile but undeniable advantages in the market, I think these tools' emphasis on interoperability and broad utility produces undeniable advantages for their users.
In other words: MySpace pulls users in and uses non-interoperability to try to make them stay. Flickr uses openness to make users happy to come and go as they please. And since Flickr can be integrated with anything, a boom in an unrelated slice of the web has a good chance of being a boon to Flickr as well. Look at what's happened to Kodak and Iphoto's "photo album" sites. Now look at the fantastic synergy between Flickr and blogging.
I've seen the same thing happen in enterprise data management applications: those that work as all-encompasing silos of information require huge investments to interoperate with, and end up either marginalized and inaccessable or integrated with everything at staggering expense. Tools that provide easy import and export of data through simple and scalable integration points propel themselves to the center of the infrastructure under their own power, at very little cost, and become indispensible.
Despite marketers' desires and businessmen's instincts, interoperability isn't a leak letting users out. It makes your product the New York Stock Exchange.
Seth Godin said: "[M]any retailers believe that they still have the power to inconvenience shoppers as a way of increasing revenue." He was talking about product arrangement at the supermarket, but the thought applies equally to data management. Trying to lock your customers in creates a force pushing your product out. Inconvenience isn't leverage any more. It's just inconvenient.
Anyway, back to all these Web 2.0 shenanigans.
Today, Marc Andreessen said, "It is crystal clear to me now that at least in industries where lots of people are online, blogging is the single best way to communicate and interact."
Absolutely.
And now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to code up a blogging client for EMACS.