SteveStreeting.com

I came across Tim O’Reilly’s post entitled Open Source and Cloud Computing today, and I was pretty happy to see that his thoughts reinforced what I was saying a couple of months ago about how I thought isolated, corporate-owned islands in the ‘cloud’ were not a beneficial model for the Internet long-term, despite the short-term convenience in today’s society.

I was also very interested to see from his links in that article that some in the open source community are already forming plans to address it. It’s early days yet, but I look forward to a day when we can have all the convenience of sites like Facebook provide without having to cede control of our data to a centralised corporate entity searching desperately for a way to dissect that data & our browsing behaviour for revenue opportunities.

It’s funny because when talking about this issue to a friend recently, I made the comparison between sites like Facebook now, and the ‘gated communities’ of AOL / Compuserve in the past, before the Internet took off. They too used their sealed community to generate revenue, but when people finally had the option to become free of that and get the same functionality, users deserted in their droves to the liberated environment of the Internet. Tim used the same analogy in his article, so maybe I’m not crazy after all.

To my everlasting disgust I finally caved in and signed up to Facebook today. My singular reason was that a friend of mine has just moved to North America (to complete his years-long transition to the dark side) and he’d stated his intentions to publish most of his personal stuff there rather than blogging about it, so with much grumbling I now have a placeholder account to let me peer into that little den.

Now that I have my own account rather than peering quizzically at other people’s (over my horn-rimmed spectacles perhaps, as is implied when people hear I don’t use it), I still say Facebook has so few new ideas that it’s absolutely criminal that it’s valued so highly. It does the job sure, in a vaguely pedestrian way, but I see nothing more than a few tiny refinements on what everyone else has already done a ton of times before.  I still reckon it’s on borrowed time until someone else does something sexier and the student population move on to the next fad - just like they did the last 2 or 3 times. I’ve lost count of the number of social networking sites I’ve been invited to over the years (since about 2003/4 when they started getting popular), and after having gone through temporary membership of a few by 2005/6 I just got totally just bored with the whole thing. Now that I’ve finally joined Facebook, I’m fully expecting one or more of my friends / family / contacts to invite me to join the next thing that ‘everybody’s using’ in about 6 months - that’s normally how it works. Yawn. I certainly can’t be arsed to obsess over the content of my profile all over again. No, I’ll stick to LinkedIn where I can actually derive some (small) tangible business benefit, and my blog which I control and is thus doesn’t have to be moved / recreated every time fashion changes. And no, I don’t feel the need to start twittering, we all know where that can lead.

But the thought of being a part of something that that pompous, vacuous git Zuckerberg benefits from - ugh. I think I need a shower.