The roads I take...

This xkcd comic appeared under a different title, but even if Instagram was the recent case that brought up discussions like that, you can say the same for almost any cloud service, including the likes of Facebook, proprietary app stores, Dropbox, and a ton of others:



Just look for example at this piece of the terms of yet another cloud service that I was asked to sign on recently:

So, basically, the cloud service can do anything with any content put in there. Anything put on there cannot be a "secret" and must be seen as being public - and of course the content and any data derived from it (like behavior, etc.) can and will be sold to others - after all, the cloud provider needs to earn money with something.

A long-standing saying about the cloud is that "if you aren't paying for the product, you are the product being sold". Everyone creating a service wants to feed him/herself and make a living, at least, and the money for that needs to come from something. I'm not saying I'm against cloud services, they enable some cool stuff at times, but you always should be aware that you hand over control to the service provider. And I feel better with any service that's telling me how they're generating the money to enable a living for their employees. Those that don't are the ones that make me feel worried when "putting my stuff in their garage".

If you want to keep control over your content yourself, there's of course a number of open and distributed alternative services out there that you can look into, for example Diaspora*, Open Web Apps, Persona, OpenPhoto, ownCloud, and others.

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?