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For my first blog post in quite a while, I'd like to open up with a conversation I had with a coworker last week. The conversation started off at how unfriendly the limits for accessing the Twitter API have become especially for a one-off use.
At the beginning, one of the appeals to Twitter was their developer friendly culture and being the new shiny toy on the block. However as with most projects that receive venture funding, one needs to have a source of revenue to become a viable business. With most other social media sites, this resulted in generating ad revenue or sponsoring tweets. In addition, Twitter wanted to curate the user experience on their site by restricting what third party apps could do. The thing is that other social media websites were either already doing this or moving in this general direction.
Now where this involves my coworker, and the timing of this piece is that there were a couple of efforts that came out of this time-frame as a result of the developer outrage. Mainly Disapora and ADN came out as a result. With Disapora, it was meant as a pro-privacy social network where the code would be out in the open and a distributed hosting model such that you wouldn't have to worry about a company taking your postings and trying to turn that into ad revenue. ADN had a different model where instead of collecting data and then providing ads, they would charge a low annual fee of roughly $35/yr for normal users, and IIRC $100/yr for developers. The funds would go straight to maintaining the infrastructure.
While Disapora is still around, and had some rather rough growing pains, ADN first cut the price of their offerings, but then at the beginning of 2017 announced they were shutting down. How much of this is awareness of the product, or we as consumers of the social web expect everything to be free with the hidden cost of our posts, profile data, or our eyeballs?
Strange thing is that I still our data is our own. What we post belongs to us, and we should be able to share it however we wish while being able to manipulate it as others share with us. By the same token, the companies that provide us with this service need to make money as well. The cost of hosting the infrastructure is not cheap. In addition, it is in their interest to lock you into their platform, and keep you there as long as possible. This is why you rarely see 3rd party clients for Facebook or Twitter, and why a large number of links to outside sources renders a web page inside the official client on your cell phone instead of your web browser.
For me, the interest is two-fold with a couple of things I've been bouncing around and working on in the background. One of which is something that replaces the TweetDeck client, which worked out great for aggregating your social media timelines into a single interface while allowing you to post to multiple sites. The other is a means of allowing users to take their data back not just from various social media sites, but also from various cloud providers where they can host the data at home, and then share it amongst their friends and family. The latter will require quite a bit of work, and is something I've been laying the groundwork for. With the growth of broadband or hosting, what was once considered infeasable is now starting to look more doable.
If there are other efforts in this space that I haven't mentioned (and I'm sure there are) or any other ideas, I'd love to hear them.