Own Your Data

A partial reconstruction of a discussion between Jeffrey Zeldman, Tantek Çelik, and a few others on the merits of self-hosting social content and publishing to various sites rather than aggregating locally from external sources.

I’ve been following discussions like this with some interest lately. Jeremy Keith posted a piece on his decision to self-host his bookmarks and cross-post to Delicious, rather than enter them in Delicious first and rely on their API to get his data out. Stephen Hay wrote a similar post on a shift in the way we post and consume content given the plethora of social content-sharing sites in existence today:

For a while we’ve posted our data all over the internet on all types of services. These services provide APIs so we can access the data we put into them, so that we can do things with that data. Read that again.

The prime example of all this lately is the social bookmarking site Delicious. In December 2010, a slide leaked from a Yahoo meeting indicated that Delicious was to be shut down. People on Twitter and elsewhere on the web collectively freaked out. Some people had thousands of bookmarks that would seemingly be gone, lost forever at the whim of Yahoo. People started to wonder if someone should instead build an open-source version of Delicious, and others pointed out how extraordinarily hard that would be. The end result being, people are starting to realize just how frail our data is. We post photos, articles, tweets, and whatever else we want, to lots of different sites, but we don’t actually have control over that data once we hit “post.”

So is it better to self-host your content and push that data out to separate services, or post directly to those services and pull your content into local backups after the fact? I don’t have that answer. But I did find this exchange on Twitter to be quite fascinating, and wanted to have some sort of linear record of it for posterity.

Update (Jan 10): Jeffrey Zeldman expounded on his thoughts from yesterday in a post on his own site:

We can’t preserve social relationships connected to our data. I can save my photos but not nice things you said about them.

– Own Your Data on zeldman.com

Update 2 (Jan 10): Tantek has posted his own follow-up as well:

I’d rather host my data and live with such awkwardness in the open than be a sharecropper on so many beautiful social content farms.

– On Owning Your Data on tantek.com