social media

There’s a new social media platform called Ello, that’s making a splash for their ad-free policy and their outspoken criticism of their social media brethren. Their manifesto:

Your social network is owned by advertisers.

Every post you share, every friend you make and every link you follow is tracked, recorded and converted into data. Advertisers buy your data so they can show you more ads. You are the product that’s bought and sold.

We believe there is a better way. We believe in audacity. We believe in beauty, simplicity and transparency. We believe that the people who make things and the people who use them should be in partnership.

We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce and manipulate — but a place to connect, create and celebrate life.

You are not a product.

The response has been overwhelming for the invite-only network, with requests in recent days at times exceeding 40,000 per hour.

But I suspect that their no-add policy is only part of the reason why Ello is getting so much attention. Om Malik hit the nail on the head with this Twitter post:

The obsessive coverage of Ello is less about Ello. Instead it really is about our growing dissatisfaction with the state of social networks.

— Om Malik (@om) September 26, 2014

Dave Winer immediately followed up with his Manifesto for Web Writing:

The web of 2014 is in the middle of a huge battle to force people to write the stuff in the same place people read it. Whether you hate advertising or not doesn’t matter, it’s all part of the same system. You make me, as a writer, choose either to give it all to you, or none to you. And yet the underlying network that we use, doesn’t have these limits.

I find it ironic and unsettling that the Internet, a decentralized network where data is distributed without prejudice, has become such a compartmentalized place. When it comes to social networks, we are forced to choose which ones we belong to, based largely on the number of people we know there. We become part of a social network where fraternization with the world outside its walls is discouraged. This negates the very thing that drew me to the Internet in the first place: the ability to communicate with anyone, at any time, because we share a common platform.

My current solution to this dilemma is imperfect. I have a place that I control at gregfalken.com. This is where you can find me and where I share things that I think you might find interesting. From there, I am using IndieWeb principals and projects to distribute my words to other networks that make it possible to do so. For today, that means Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Those of you who know that I’m a Google fanboy will be surprised that Google Plus isn’t on the list. Google, in it’s mysterious wisdom, has decided that Google Plus will not accept input from the outside world. In programmer-speak they have no write API (application programming interface), so anything that I post there has to be done manually.

The best that I can say about this solution is that it’s fairly flexible. As other networks come along they can be added, provided that they offer the inclusiveness of a read/write API. Right now WordPress is my authoring platform of choice but that too can change.

It’s discouraging that it takes so much effort to reach across these social media boundaries. I will continue to explore the options and encourage those of you who are interested to do the same. Please let me know in the comments if you have found any alternatives for broadcasting your own words beyond the single purpose networks.

I’ve started a little experiment here on gregfalken.com, in an attempt to gain some independence from the Facebook and Twitter data silos. This work is inspired by the folks at IndieWebCamp.com, who are building tools that allow website owners to host their own data, while also sharing it on other social media networks. The goal, as stated on their website:

Your content is yours
When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation. Too many companies have gone out of business and lost all of their users’ data. By joining the IndieWeb, your content stays yours and in your control.

You are better connected
Your articles and status messages can go to all services, not just one, allowing you to engage with everyone. Even replies and likes on other services can come back to your site so they’re all in one place.

You are in control
You can post anything you want, in any format you want, with no one monitoring you. In addition, you share simple readable links such as mywebsite.com/ideas. These links are permanent and will always work.

You’ll see that the top menu now has a “Notes” item. Posts in this category contain items that I would normally put on Facebook or Twitter. By posting them here, I can both maintain ownership of my content and better control what it looks like. I’m using the Social plugin by MailChimp, to publish these posts on Facebook and/or Twitter too.

Other IndieWeb enhancements to the site that aren’t visible include IndieAuth, Microformats, and Webmention (thanks to Andy Sylvester for the helpful Webmentions video). I’ll report more on these as I gain more experience with them.

I have kept the Notes posts separate from more fully formed posts like this one, by excluding them from the “Blog” page and the main RSS feed of the site. They also will not trigger an automatic email to people who have subscribed to my mailing list. They are meant to be an online collection of tidbits that I find of interest.

How my Notes posts appear on Twitter and Facebook is still something of a work in progress. If you see anything there that looks odd, please leave me a comment here. Speaking of comments, you can still leave them anonymously or you can sign in using your Twitter or Facebook account, thanks to the aforementioned Social plugin. Let me know how if you find this feature useful too.