So, since many of my friends overseas or far away are there, I’m forced to use Facebook. I find Facebook objectionable for many reasons, most of which, most people don’t care about. Facebook has a lot of powerful functions and it’s mostly easy for the nontechnical to use. After that, once a significant mass of Internet users appeared there, everyone else is drawn in.
And because of this it seems to me, after a bright beginning in the late Nineties, blog software has failed in one of it’s promises. Yes, it made the generation of Web content easy for the nontechnical but, for reasons I don’t really understand yet, blog tools never generated decentralized versions of the functions found in Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Tumbler, Linkedin and so on.
Or they did but this never really seemed compelling enough to prevent people from abandoning the Web as they seemed to have done. People gave up control and privacy for ease of use. But never mind. A lot of you who’ve read my site, have heard that rant.
Luckily I think there might be some alternatives. Luckily a lot of this new social media stuff offers open APIs if not open, decentralized networks. I think they have to right now because how else are they going to suck the Web into their realms? This seems like a loophole for alternatives to exploit. Recently I’ve been reading about Diaspora* and Bojda a new plug-in for WordPress. And there is a plug-in to add a share button at the bottom of my web pages that works with Diaspora. This gives me an alternative to Facebook’s “Like” button or Google’s “+1” button and so on. In theory, this button should work for everyone regardless of whatever social network company they use.
That is if I understand things correctly.
But sometimes for me to really understand how something works, I have to install it and try it out. You might be seeing some new gadgets and UI on my pages in the next few days.