I was about to install Disqus comment system because it’s neat and everywhere but then, I realized that they would host my blog’s conversations and have control over it.
“When you’re not paying for a service, they own you” would make a good movie line. I want to keep control over my stuff.
I didn’t join G+ because Facebook is enough. I am not doing this shit all over again with another company.
Google Reader. To me, it’s the worst of them all, as big G knows everything about everything I have a big interest in, all the time. I was very reluctant to use their service but had no choice if I wanted to sync multiple devices. Peer pressure (go on Google Reader dude! I love Google!). Plus they bought Feedburner, now we have fugly feedproxy.google.com or gross utm_source=feedburner& instead of nice HTML links. Fuck Google Reader.
RSS is barely use by the Internet -like 3 or 5% of people are using it- though it’s used by highly influential people. It must be fascinating for Google, much more interesting than what Facebook gathers when your cousin shares a stupid video or likes that you were drunk last weekend.
So there’s Tiny Tiny RSS which is nice and cool but hell, this is so rough. I dream about a OPML file on my server with clients (desktop, mobile) connecting and syncing to it. That doesn’t seem that crazy, does it? Well it doesn’t exist so I guess it’s crazy.
I almost signed up for Spotify. Peer pressure; “125 of your friends use it!” bullshit. I signed up on Facebook through peer pressure too from people not using it at all since then. At least it’s very useful for family stuff, especially when distance plays a big role.
Diaspora was meant to be a nice replacement but it went nowhere. I don’t get it. It was great. Tabs used as filters is the best shit ever. Every single browser does it but wait, I just saw that they killed that feature on the website. Anyway, they seem back on track for something, stay tuned.
Flickr? Well I pay so I own my stuff. Paying automatically creates a much better trust. I just wish they would evolve much faster than what they do now. There’s no real alternative but they really have a hard time evolving, it’s painful to watch.
Twitter? All the competition died. I found status.net but like Diaspora, it’s pretty weird. An open source software that does Twitter should be doable or am I missing something? I love Twitter but I don’t understand what they do with it, they still have technical problems, they focus on pictures (???), don’t want developers to create clients even if it’s what made them, there’s nothing that makes sense. I still can’t have access to the thousands of tweets I sent like I have access to my six years worth of blog posts. Fucking silo.