An Idea for a Web Application

I’ve been coming repeatedly to a simple conclusion regarding content
creation and the use of social services:

If something is worth creating, it’s worth keeping within your own control.

This includes quick little comments on the world, or sharing interesting
links (Twitter), to posting and sharing content through something like
Google+. I’ve been blogging since 1999, so I have over 5,000 posts saved
within mysql, but what about Twitter? Where did those 3,000 posts go? Was
any of it worth saving? Why did I put it there and not on my site?

To me it’s quite simple: if it’s worth sharing then it’s good enough for me
to feel bad about not having permanently as part of my digital avatar. And
if it’s not good enough for that, then maybe I shouldn’t be creating/sharing
it in the first place.

The concept of some content being on Twitter, some content being on
Facebook, and some content being in Google+ is basically the approach of
someone who is not taking what they produce seriously. After five years of
doing this, what will you have? And after 20? What history will there be of
your experiences and/or contributions?

In 20 years, your Foursquare check-ins, your silly jokes, your poignant
observations, your best-find articles, your own deeper thoughts — they will
matter to you. Some of it will matter because it will be a history of
who you were and what you were doing, but some will matter because the
content itself was good.

If the answer is, “I’m not trying to make “contributions”, you uppity fool,
I’m just having fun…”, then you now know why I don’t read anything you
write, and why nobody else does either. If you don’t take what you produce
seriously, why should anyone else? And please don’t confuse seriousness with
a lack of silliness or humor — most of the funniest and silliest people
you’ll find online take their output very seriously.

Quite simply, if you care about what you put on Twitter, Google+, or other
disparate services, consider the possibility that you should be capturing
and centralizing that content somewhere that you control, e.g. your own
site, or a single trustworthy service that you can reliably export from.

All this content represents who you were and what you did. You’ll want it
later. Start now. ::