It seems that my account suspension at Twitter was a short one. I can now tweet again. That was pretty fast. When Blogger thought I was a spammer, I had to fill out a captcha form for months. Of course, I could still post. Anyway, it's an interesting thing to keep in mind with this Web 2.0. You are at the mercy of the company which controls the servers you are using. While this means that they can control spammers more easily. It also means that legitimate users are more likely to get hit by the same hand that slaps down the spammers.
With things like Twitter and blogging, this might not be so important but with GMail? A lot of people swear by their email. A ban can hurt a lot more. Worse yet, my phone's address book synchs to GMail's Contacts. A ban would be terrible for someone who depends on their phone.
Ultimately, the issue of ownership will have to be resolved before Web 2.0 applications can trusted for truly critical uses. If I am blogging, tweeting, and doing all the other crap that we do on the web, I'm generating content. It may be crappy content, it may be useless content, but it is my content and if a company can cut off my access to it, then it's not really my content is it?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Thanks for this post. I do think we should all eventually move towards self hosted solutions. So I think backing up data is a smart thing. Some plugins are emerging to do that. Be able to suck in each twitter post as an object on your blog. That kind of thing is really the way to protect against what you've described.
Post a Comment