After upgrading to WordPress 2.5 this morning, I glanced at my feeds and read Loic’s entry about his social map:

The challenge for Friendfeed and the like is that while I really like all my services gathered in one place, I would rather that these would be centralized on my blog instead of a third party service. Yes you can cross post or add badges, but it’s not really like a center feed in your blog. What I like about my blog is that it is my space, I own it, I can customize it and change it, I do not depend on anybody (except the software and host, TypePad of course, needless to say).

I’ve said multiple times that I do not see the point in spreading myself over every social site that opens up. Looking at it realistically, new social sites will open up because the people behind the sites want to make money. Let’s give the benefit of the doubt and say they want to do something cool and innovative but in the end, most aren’t doing this out of the goodness of their heart. There is a commercial aspect to it. I have no problem with that. However, that does not mean, since the product or service itself is free, that I have to use each one. Nor does it mean that there is an actual benefit for me to use each one. I also realize the people promoting these new services (the people writing stories, doing interviews, recording videos) are doing their job and these people benefit for these products and services to remain in place, the more the merrier.

I prefer my central location to be my blog, not a third party site. I do not want to make it harder on my readers to follow me. Thinking about things long-term, spreading myself out amongst sites that may or may not be around a year or two from now does not make any sense. My words, my images, my movies…these all equal my identity and I’m going to be very picky where I place my data. Ultimately, I will not have a strong presence where I do not own the site because essentially, I would be saying that site takes priority over my own.

Yeah, that’s not going to work.

I use Twitter and as you can see on the sidebar, I imported my twits to Tyme Said but I will never use Twitter as a primary source of communication with people following me. What if Twitter closes shop or is bought out by a company that has different goals than the current team? The connection with my users would be impacted, particularly if I did not have contact information for them all. One of the new features of WordPress 2.5 is the ease of adding media to the site, putting more power in the site owner’s hands. However, if I upload a video to Blip, the company I chose to host my videos, I will embed it here. I have copies of all my videos and who knows? I might decide to upload them to Amazon instead. I can do that without chaos or losing people because my central location is my blog.

When blogging first took off people hopped on the blogging bandwagon. Blog networks popped up all over the place. How many of those blogs are still around? How many of the blog networks survived? Most of those bloggers stopped blogging (or changed blogs) and most blog networks were unable to thrive. Is it likely that these social media sites popping up will escape the same fate?

I guess the question remains: why is it people are unable to learn from past experiences?