The roads I take...

Reading David Dahl's post on "antisocial networking", I finally found a way to express what's bothering me with today's "Social Web" (no, I don't call it "Web 2.0") services:

People, and even the services themselves, talk about them as "Social Networking" but all I see is monolithic, non-networked single-corporate-hosted blobs.

Where is the network of independently operated Facebook servers that are all can easily communicate with each other but are not in control of one giant operator that has an unclear objective?

Where are the same networks for twittering, sharing personal map data (think "Google My Maps"), videos, photos?

Where are the messaging services that connect social networking messages with instant messages and email?

If those services were on independently operated but interoperable services like blogs or the original web, there wouldn't be a few large operators in charge of all datamining, we wouldn't need to fear that one service goes down because its operator goes bankrupt or some parts of the service go down because it's sold or even one company going towards a data monopoly by acquiring one social web service after the other (see Google buying twitter, etc.).

I want control of my data (e.g. by hosting a good amount of things myself) but still have all the cool tagging stuff and other awesomeness out there being connected with it. But all I see is monolithic services instead of real social networks.

No, I don't have a Facebook, Twitter or Flickr account - yet. Even in 2009. The thoughts above are probably the most rational expression of some part of the uncertain feelings that drive me to still appear so much "backwards". I really care about the open Internet, but that includes open networking, and I still have some problems seeing that in those services.

What about you?

A Japanese blogger called "Amigomr" seems to be picking interesting posts from the Mozilla blogoshpere and translating it to Japanese to give us a wider audience in Japan. This is awesome - and something that's probably only possible due to the web and maybe the "Web 2.0" phenomenon.
And now, this blogger asked me if he was allowed to also translate my posts - so if it's easier for you to read my earlier post about The Mozilla Platform, Firefox, and SeaMonkey in Japanese, here is the translated article!

I never thought I'd see my own blog posts in a language I am not nearly able to grasp. Again, thanks, that's just awesome.