Considering the things that have happened in the last couple of months, worrying about my links at Delicious seems very trivial. But when I found the paragraphs that follow in one of my old drafts, I thought resurrecting the thread was worthwhile. I will follow up with a post about Tim Wu’s The Master Switch when I get a chance; I have been reading it the last few days, and the connection with what he discusses is what interests me about what I started out writing in the fragment below.
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I was an early adopter of Delicious, and was disappointed to hear that Yahoo was intending to close it. Yahoo did not make an announcement – the news came in the form of a “leaked” slide from a business presentation. A couple days later, the Delicious blog posted a response saying the service was not going away, and that people should keep using it. A good home, outside of Yahoo, would be the best thing, blah blah.
By the time I read the “keep calm and carry on” post, I had already moved my bookmarks to a couple of other sites. More importantly, I saved my exported file locally, and am working on my own application to solve the problem of a universally available bookmarking tool. I made a local copy of my photostream from Flickr as well, since Flickr is another Yahoo service. I felt like a panicky account holder taking his money out of the bank. Why all the fuss? One word sums up what I am after: autonomy.
The Gawker and SilverPop hacking stories helped increase my sensitivity to the idea that each of us needs to be more concerned about maintaining our own well-being on the internet.
We don’t want to lose valuable assets like years of links, in the case of Delicious, or to have our online identities usurped, in the case of the Gawker security failure. Of course it makes sense to take steps to avoid running into these problems, but like a run on the bank, the risk is a kind of stagnation.
If I never got in the habit of using Delicious, I know I would have saved fewer bookmarks. The personal artifacts of my links and tags would not exist, because I would have never bothered to preserve them. I never would have found the other users of Delicious whose areas of interest intersect mine, because a file of URLs on my desktop can’t take part in the “chance encounters” with other links that an online service like Delicious hosts. The loose interaction on sites like Flickr or Delicious lead to interesting associations. I don’t want to move all these nice things into a walled city like Facebook.
Dan Gillmor suggests we maintain our own outpost on the web. Your email is your email, when you pay for hosting at a company that respects your privacy, or host it at your own server under your desk.
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