With Facebook accounting for 25% of US pageviews and their conquest of the internet growing by day, it looks like the rest of the web is on the way to becoming terra incognita – a dangerous place with dragons and headless face-chested men. But still a more interesting hangout than Zuckerberg’s insipid blue and white diner. It seems the only hope for the social web is in tumblr.
I wish Tumblr and others success but hold out for opensource blogging software on cheap shared hosts like tubu.net. Here, I’m not in competition for coolness or influence. It’s just what interests me. Facebook, Twitter, Google and these other companies make me feel like I’m their commodity. Most users don’t even seem to mind.
In the 20th century we only had to worry about our credit rating. In the 21st century we increasingly have to think about our “social rating” or however it eventually comes to be defined. In such a world, I prefer to drop out. It may not be true today, but I predict that the hippies of our era will make sure that they remain under the radar of the commercial social networks. Truly we need a new social movement: not a ludite web-rejecting canaille, but a tech-savvy coterie that embraces FOSS and open source distributed social networks such as Appleseed or Diaspora are trying to cook.