Okay, so what is up with all these social networking sites that don’t actually do anything ?
micro-blogging
We have stuff like twitter (and now Plurk as Gwyn has pointed me to). These are just blogging tools with fancy interfaces. You only get the short-term convenience of having built-in aggregation, friends list management and access control. Emphasis on short-term.
But the device-integration!
Granted, some services do have SMS device integration- but then again, most modern mobile phones (cell phones to you stateside peeps) have the facility to send emails, and pretty much every blogging platform supports blog-by-email. Admittedly, not having to figure out how to setup my own SMS-proxy service (which can end up being rather expensive to maintain) is advantageous, but I personally don’t need to “tweet” from my phone. I would rather use a generic SMS to email service (perhaps provided by my mobile provider ?) than direct SMS integration.
But I can follow everyone’s comments!
Use an RSS/Atom aggregation tool. There are plenty web and desktop-based tools out there- I don’t need anything fancy, I just use Flock. Incidentally, Gwyn also pointed me at FriendFeed- Flock does what FriendFeed does, and I don’t need to signup to a separate service to use it’s features.
But I can manage my friends list!
Ever hear of XFN ? It’s a microformat that effectively allows you to manage your friends list in a pseudo-intuitive, inline (no separate files or services) manner.
Services such as Flickr have API calls that allow third party services to interact with your friends list as well, so there’s no real need to have a meta-app have an internal friends list system (by the way, I’m a strong advocate of API vs the “I can haz passwurdz?” approach sites like MySpace take).
Data Portability
It seems a fair amount of SL Residents are abandoning twitter now the jabber integration seems, well- dead. Numerous outtages, lost tweets- they all put people off using a service (Twitter isn’t alone there). Some people may not be bothered by the lack of the jabber feature, but others (myself included) interacted with Twitter solely through the instant messaging interface- even with dual monitors, I don’t want to have a single web page up just to keep an eye on messages (though I do have Thunderbird permanently maximized in the background of the second monitor, I just don’t look at it constantly).
What happens if you say enough is enough, and leave one service for another ?
I started out blogging on google’s blogspot service. I had a bunch of problems with it, and decided to migrate to WordPress.com. No problem there, they had a built-in tool to auto-migrate the entire blog archives over in bulk. More recently however, I decided to self-host as I wanted to experiment with more things than the WordPress.com-provided WordPress allowed for. Again, no problem there- just download the WXR file from the WordPress.com blog and upload it to here.
So what if I want to migrate all my old twitter posts over to Plurk, or even onto my own, self-hosted microblog ? There isn’t currently any automated way to do so, which means I’d have to write my own tool. As a geek, such an exercise would be trivial for me- but were I not so technically inclined, I’d have the choice between having to start over again, or port everything over by hand.
Summary
In the long-term, services like Twitter, Plurk, FriendFeed suck ass. Creating an account on a third party service just for the short-term convenience of avoiding setting something up yourself will result in loads of forgotten passwords, throwaway email accounts, and duplicated or otherwise stale data floating around in the sea of information.
The solution ? Go decentralised. Blog from the comfort of your own site or third-party platform that allows import/export. Manage friends lists with XFN and have a service parse the data for access control.