I’ve returned to delicious, last.fm and Flickr (although I prefer SmugMug). I’ve gone so far as to add Gmail, Twitter and of course, Facebook.

The good thing is that now that I’m no longer hosting most of my online identity, I can do things like drop in SmugMug photos (even ones taken from my iPhone) easily. I took this one from the new apartment.

I still think Web 2.0 in its current configuration is really bad for users. Just a few weeks ago, I ran an application that pulled all my friends information from Facebook. Facebook responded by locking my account and preventing me from seeing my messages, photos, events, contacts, links, etc. They did not let me know why they closed the account and all emails I sent to them went unanswered. A similar thing happened to internet hero, Robert Scobel. Luckily, I know some folks who are connected to Facebook and so I worked that social network for a few days and eventually got the account back.

These companies should not have that kind of power over our data, but until someone comes up with a better solution for me to keep track of my friends, I guess I’ll have to man up and take my chances…

There are a few del.icio.us clones, but the best out there is Scuttle which has the perk of supporting the del.icio.us API. The install was slightly irritating, and I can only tag bookmarks for people on anokwa.com, but I do have it running and it’s pretty good. I’ll hoping to code up cross-server tagging in a few weeks, but until then you can see my links at http://links.anokwa.com/.

Next up is a Flickr replacement which is coming along nicely at http://gallery.anokwa.com/.

Ever since the sale of last.fm to CBS, I haven’t felt comfortable submitting my listening data. Most of you know I’ve felt the same way about Google and now I feel the same way now about delicious, flickr, facebook, etc. I’ve already moved my data off last.fm and soon I’ll remove it from the others.

The biggest loss for me is delicious, but I think I’ll be able to do something similar in this blog — maybe with a plugin or just how I tag it. As far as calendaring, photos, video and music sharing, I think between iCal, iPhoto and WebDAV, I can do most of what I want to do. Dreamhost even has BitTorrent and flash encoders to do file and video sharing.

Once I have more free time, I’ll explain my master plan in detail, but by the end of the month, I’ll be Web 2.0 free. Seriously. Why should CBS have my music listening habits? Why should Google know who I have appointments with? Why should Yahoo know what sites I’m recommending to my friends? Why should Facebook know what movies I want to see? It’d be one thing if they had clearly defined policies on what they do with the data, but they don’t.

You guys should join the revolution.

In case someone on the internets stumbles on this page (or I run into the same problem again), the solution is to add a function_exists around the gravatar div in comments.php template.

<?php if (function_exists(‘gravatar’)) {?>
<div class=”gravatar”>
<img src=”<?php gravatar(“R”, 40); ?>” alt=”Gravatar” />
</div>
<?php } ?>

If you have no idea what this means, then don’t worry about it.