Distributing social sites

I’ve never gotten interested in any of the big social sites. I mess around on Facebook now and then, but it never feels right to me. I think I’m allergic to having so much of my data so out of my control. Or maybe I feel like I don’t have enough control over how the site works. Seems to be about control, anyway.

I’ve been dreaming a bit about what I think I would use. I want a distributed social system (distributed? on the Internets? what a completely outrageous idea!). I want all of my data stored wherever I decide to put it. I want the software I use (also under my control) watching me to see who I talk to, how often, what about, etc. All that data (still under my control), is used to evolve a social network. All it’s really doing is showing me my activities in useful ways, but over time it would make things easier. My friends would be easy to find and keep track of, and I’d automatically see whatever online activities they share.

The internet is just a big people connector, so why go to just one site for all my people connections? Use the nature of the net and the power of my own hardware to connect with people, and share things, and meet new people, and all that good stuff. Use different services for whatever they’re best at. Sync them all back to my own archive/dashboard/home system. The value in the various social sites is in the ways they can connect people, and in the neat things they can tease out of the data they collect. Use them for that, but don’t let them have any real control or ownership over the bits of me I choose to share with them.

There are some interesting projects and smart people out there working on this sort of thing, or at least the beginnings of it. DiSo looks interesting, and they seem to have sensible goals: get something working, and reuse stuff that already works. Exactly the right way to go, I’d say.