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The personal media server

Posted 07.18.08 by admin

A comment by David on my last post made me realise that there may be an opening for a new type of product.

David says “Social networks- (like this one, Blogger) are nothing other than “the man” asking the sharecroppers to till his fields. That’s right- if you don’t own the server space, you are nothing but a digital sharecropper.”

Owning your own server space seems to run counter to the trend of web services and computing as a utility, however it does make sense from a couple of other angles.

For a start, if the real value in social media lies with the people and what the people generate – rather than with the platform and the functionality that the platform provides – why wouldn’t (at least some) people want to start to take advantage of that value for themselves. Secondly as Friend-Connect and other similar services start appearing, the need for me to “go somewhere” to be social diminishes. Rather than meeting out at Twitter or Facebook, why can’t we meet over at my place or your place. The metaphor of a town square that social networks are building isn’t really that necessary in a virtual world. And thirdly, the most likely users of such a product, heavy contributors, would benefit greatly from having all their conversations, posts, bookmarks, activity, etc stored in one space. Searchable though a single interface, and integrated with their personal documents and records.

It feels to me that Google would be the most likely to release a product like this – a personal server, pre-configured with a blog platform and other Friend-Connect gadgets. It would aggregate all your activity under your own domain name and allow for open (social) conversations to take place which would be mirrored on the personal media servers of everyone else in the conversation. If they wanted to be really disruptive, they could potentially deal a death blow to the various other social networks by giving away the server free in return for an agreement to give them the advertising space.

What do you think? Would you host your own server?

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  • curiouslypersistent

    Hi Adrian

    A very thought-provoking post.

    From the sounds of it, I’m not too sure that your proposition would deviate too much from the current situation. While sharecroppers only rent land, social networkers also need to rent the tools (pre-configured, interoperable platforms). Perhaps I’m too cynical, but I can’t see Google (or whomever) renting/selling the tools without the land as well…
    Simon

  • Adam

    They did.

    They 'released' the people who went on to make FriendFeed. Whatever's good for the web (something tht produces information) is good for Google's profits ("Organize the world's information.") Google is operating at a scale higher. They don't need to monetise their own tools in the competitive sense, their tools are free R&D for everyone else to improve upon. Whatever's good for the web…

    Why do we need personal servers of our own? Ning allows you to aggregate content and sell the adspace around it – for a fee.

    But still, there's more value to be created in the world than selling attention to advertising dollars.

    I'm probably missing something here.

  • Adrian

    @curiouslypersistent I wonder if a situation could develop where open source tools became the defacto social platforms (a la apache). Feels to me that social services (and the data) are important enough that an open source solution will gain traction at some point.

    @adam owning your data makes it easier to use for a host of other reasons as well as making it easier to integrate with private non-shared data. I have a host of documents on my computer which I will never share but which are related to my public/social content – and I’d love to have them ALL under my control. Try taking that data from Ning (or any aspect of that data) and using it somewhere else – it’s much harder than it should be considering its yours.

  • adam

    *nods*

    I wonder how the data portability folks are doing?

    http://www.dataportability.org

  • David Esrati

    Hi Adrian-
    Glad to get you thinking-
    I got the term Digital Sharecropper from my digital friend D’Arcy Norman’s site.
    Have you read much about Open Social?
    It’s Google’s integration tool for social media sites.
    The reality is- our future space in cyberspace will probably be hosted right on our hip- in an advanced iPhone like device.
    Some of us are still a little wary of Google- even with their “do no evil” mantra- the amount of information that they have access to could be used for good- or evil very easily.
    Each of us has value to some marketer- and if Google can correctly connect marketers to consumers by exchanging entertainment for access- they will have cracked the code on the big kahuna- totally targeted media (yes- I read your new post about targeting).
    This is, I believe, what Google’s ultimate brand position will be- the go-between advertisers and consumers for connecting the two without any waste.
    Thanks for the nod.
    I hope we get to sit and talk this out over a beer sometime.

  • Adrian

    I do know about Open Social, think it’s a step in the right direction – but it’s an initiative to let you USE your data elsewhere not to OWN it. Control still resides elsewhere – I think this is going to be a big issue soon as people get smarter about how much information they’re really giving up AND what that information is really worth. Would love to discuss this over a beer, I enjoy discussing almost anything over a beer!

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