Unlike the real world, if we don’t like it, we can kill it

But there is on thing that we should always remember. At the end of the day we, the users, control the success of Facebook just like every other brand or product in the world. Facebook is making money because we are allowing it to become every marketers dream, it is the code from the Matrix wrapped around everything we post, share, comment, or connect with. If tomorrow we stop showing up that valuation would go south very quickly. It happened to Friendster, it happened to Bebo, it happened to MySpace, and it will and should happen to Facebook. Users have expressed concern about the privacy policy and the ownership of content uploaded to their network.

Greg Cargill on Big Method

In wake of the Delicious “sunsetting” and subsequent hub-bub around the web, Jeremy Keith decided to homestead his bookmarks.

Now I’m hosting the canonical copies of my bookmarks, much like Tantek hosts the canonical copies of his tweets and syndicates them out to Twitter. Delicious gets to have my links as well, and I get to use Delicious as a tool for interacting with my data …only now I’m not limited to just what Delicious can offer me.

He actually first wrote about this when Magnolia screwed the pooch and lost everyone’s data. He nails the homesteading vision in one sentence.

Really, I should be keeping my links here on adactio.com, maybe pinging Delicious or some other social bookmarking site as a back-up.

Freedom and self-sufficiency always seem to go hand in hand. But specialization is for insects, right? Everyone should know how to make a website and deliver a baby. (I believe that’s how the expression goes.)

I definitely prefer this self-hosting-with-syndication way of doing things. I can use a service like Delicious without worrying about it going tits-up and taking all my data with it. The real challenge is going to be figuring out a way of applying that model to Twitter and Flickr. I’m curious to see which milestone I’ll hit first: 10,000 tweets or 10,000 photos. Either way, that’s a lot of my content on somebody else’s servers.

I used to go to shows a lot. Not so much anymore. When I did, I usually took my camera and took photos. When I started it was with my mom’s crappy point and click 110. Later I got my own 35mm. I asked for a fully manual camera, but got a fully auto one. I went through a black and white phase while I was in art school, mainly because it was cheaper and I could develop it myself. But also because I thought it was cool.

Today I ran into a dude from an old band that I shot once. Like most bands, I never was able to give a copy of the photos to the band. It made me realize that while most all of the photos I took back then are on Flickr, people who would care to see them mostly don’t know they exist. So, here’s a blast shot into the abyss, that maybe someone will hear.

I shot almost everything that I went to. As it turns out, it was all on film (110, 35mm, Polaroid). By the time I got a digital camera, I had stopped shooting photos and had moved on to digital video (another post for another day.)

In writing this post, I realized that there are still a handful of bands that aren’t scanned/uploaded yet. I’ll get that remedied some day. I started when I was 15. My first show was Shelter and Enkindel (which was supposed to be Earth Crisis, but they crashed their van). Here’s a very small sampling of bands that I photographed.

Hardcore bands

• By The Grace Of God
• Birthright
• Boy Sets Fire

Punk rock

• Avail
• No Use for a Name
• Good Riddance

Ska bands

• MU330
• Assorted Jellybeans
• Citzen Fish

Big bands before they got that big

• Limp Bizkit
• Goldfinger
• Sugar Ray

(and for some reason a mountain of ICP photos)

Big bands that were hopelessly far away

• Rancid
• Rage Against the Machine

Little hometown hero bands

• Neena Foundry
• Eiffel Tower High
• Cheese Weed

And weird bands

• Pug
• Blaster the Rocket Boy
• Boris the Sprinkler
• And many many more…

---

About a year ago, WordPress.com did something really cool. They rolled out a clone of the Twitter API for their service. This allowed existing Twitter client apps, like Tweetie 2 (now Twitter for iPhone) and Twitterific, to be used as WordPress.com client apps too. A few days later, Tumblr did the same thing. Super fucking cool.

Now I could use Tweetie to post to Tumblr blog, my WordPress.com blog or any number of my Twitter accounts all from the same app. How fucking awesome is that?

Nearly everyone uses Twitter. (If they don’t use Twitter, they use Facebook.) One of the knock-on effects of Twitter’s pervasiveness is that there are heaps of Twitter client apps for iOS (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch), BlackBerry, Android, Windows, Mac and Linux. Hell, Amiga probably has a Twitter client app. Seriously, what platform doesn’t a have Twitter client app? What that means is WordPress.com and Tumblr have native client apps are nearly every platform.

Imagine if you built a web service of some sort and did the same thing. If you built a clone of the Twitter API then instantly you have a slew of native client apps already installed on everyone’s phones and computers. Fucking insane!

So. I think Ruby community needs to get on this. Imagine if we had a gem that was a clone of the Twitter API that anyone could drop into their app. Bang pow, anyone can easily and quickly harness all those Twitter client apps out in the wild.

Anyone with me?

PS. I’ve been told about Twetter. That might be a good starting point, but it seems like Twetter is more of a stand alone app and is about offline tooting. I want a drop-in library.

I’ve been building up this mixtape over the past several weeks. Inspired by Drew Hoolhorst’s and Heather Peterson’s (and a bajillion other people’s) mixtapes, today I decided to release it.

Download the full mixtape as a .zip file.

Enjoy.