Social Media 2012

My comment on Alex’s blog :

Well, you already know but I still think wiki has a future, as pointed to by Smallest Federated Wiki. There are some flaws / issues with SFW, mainly I think because not enough people are working on it, but it’s still the signpost for how wiki could evolve. 

Would still love to see you and other UseMod / OddMuse people look at ways to engage, even if you don’t switch over. 

2012 is the year when it just became more and more clear that we need our own space and shouldn’t be dependent on Fb / Tw / G+ etc. 

Fb / Tw / G+ offer two compelling things : 1) an aggregate river of stuff from people we care about, 2) really easy transclusion from various rich media sites. 

We could have a distributed river architecture if we took RSS and some kind of pubsub architecture (eg. RssCloud) seriously. SFW has made transclusion protocols central to its philosophy. If we pick up on both, figure out how to get the most important things we get from the mainstream working smoothly, we can create a compelling alternative on our terms. And one of the interesting, overlooked, facts about G+ is that it showed that significant numbers of people are still willing to experiment with alternatives. As long as you can get a critical mass of around 20 people you care about to use it, G+ is as valuable as anything else. You don’t need 1 billion users. You aren’t trying to take over the world at this point, just to have a syndication / discussion architecture which isn’t owned by THEM.

Join the Conversation

1 Comment

  1. Hey Phil, just wanted to remind that in amongst its various features and flaws TiddySpace has support for pubsub and Atom feeds on just about everything (collections, filtered collections, single items, search results). I suspect I’ve mentioned this before but seeing you mention it…

    There’s a disturbing amount of power and flexibility lurking around in the TiddlyWeb/TiddlySpace combo, but it has been obscured by lack of resources on the human interaction sides of the system. Always looking for participants.

    There’s some older info about pubsub and Atom in my space.

    I really need to get back into the flow of stuff.

Leave a comment

Leave a Reply to Anonymous Cancel reply