Masterliv: Ranting about where to upload my memories

6min. . 🏷 Facebook Alternatives Facebook Rant Google Rant Uploading Photos Where to Upload Photos

It’s a late Wednesday night, 03:22 to be exact. And I lost track of time because I found some four year old photos and started reminisce. This in turn made me really want to share these funny photos, and that plunged me straight into the dilemma of where to upload my photos or if I should upload them anywhere.

There seems to be a gut feeling in me, telling me that I should hold back from just uploading everything I have up on Facebook. People might get offended by my blatant self-glorification, others might be delighted to be able to reminisce with me having unearthed these photos and shared them.

It struck me that perhaps I should upload my photos to Flikr instead, it _does _have features to control privacy. But why? Why am I more inclined to put my photos up on Flikr instead of Facebook, maybe it’s because I can see right in front of me what Flikr makes money on (which is their pro accounts). And Flikr’s goal is to become the best web service for photos that is. Flikr has arguably started dabbling with video, but within some healthy artistic constraints by restricting the video length to 90 seconds (which makes it more of a richer photo instead). It’s a good call because it helps separate Flikr from every other picture and video service else out there.

Facebook on the other hand does not seem to have a clear direction on things, just to be everything to everyone, everything that a person would need. Well, it does make money on adverts. It makes money on it’s community, by having a lot of users. As does Google, it makes money because it has a lot of users that sees their ads. And as I’m writing this I’m starting to suspect that my problem with Google and Facebook is mostly the way they choose to make their money. Hell, if I were to only use products that were not built to make money then I would be living a quit spartan life. No, it’s almost as if I’d pay a yearly subscription … But no, I won’t. Or maybe. Regardless, I went out there and found some alternative social media concepts.

  1. Identi.ca, a non-profit twitter. I’ve known about it for quite some time. Their not trying to make money on it, I think. But instead they provide the source code for the whole solution so you could host your own Twitter with them being readily available as hired support.
  2. Path, a social network site that limits the amount of friends to 150. I guess having fewer people that you share with, makes you more comfortable to open up.
  3. Anybeat (formerly Altly). This service is not trying to replace Facebook or Twitter, but instead be a place to converse with other people on various topics (apparantly).
  4. Thimbl. Like identi.ca also presents itself as an alternative to money grubbing corporations.
  5. And the list could go on and on, and I’m frankly too tired to dig up anything else. I came across a nice discussion below this Techcrunch article that introduced Altly aka. Anybeat.

“Thing is I never wanted a Facebook replacement. I wanted lots of little Facebooks, each with a lot less power than the original, which was never really acceptable to me.” – Silner Microblogger.

I like that thought a lot, a lot of smaller social networks instead. Maybe in time, we will all be sitting in different social networks and talking with each other. A blog can be a social network. There is plenty of frameworks out there for making it happen. We do so already do this at some level, but our user data is still largely “siloed” (yet public). An example of what I mean, is that I could off course just up and move my pictures to Flikr and remove the one’s at Facebook. However, that would break the photo tagging. A lot of my friends’ profiles would lose out on photos they’ve tagged themselves in, and a chance to reminisce. Now that I’ve written that thought out, and I sit and stare at it it looks a bit silly.

*Yawn*

As a last note I can say that I subscribed to Crashplan in order to get unlimited online backup, however after I set it up to upload 400gb worth of data it told me that I only had 6months left for that to be completed. And that equals a cancellation of that subscription, leaving me with simply buying some harddrives and copying data between them. Chrashplan can even do that automatically, letting you share space to other computers. You could give  storage space on your harddrive to friends, automatically, like a Dropbox.

*Yawn*

I think too much. :)