On crawling back to the Web 2.0…
I tried my damnest to live without Web 2.0, but I have to admit that the usefulness (tons of tools, simpler interfaces, momentum) outweigh the potential privacy and data ownership issues.
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…
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