The new De-Centralization of the Web - Centralized Me
One trend that occurs over and over on the World Wide Web is the shift from Centralized websites to De-Centralized websites. Centralization occurs because people get tired of searching hundreds to thousands of sites to find a few pieces of information. De-centralization occurs because we get tired of reading the same few pieces of information and want more detail. The first big time Centralized website was Yahoo and in recent years its been the Social Networks led by MySpace. De-Centralized websites were called HomePage’s(still my favorite web term of all time). With Myspace the impetus was for finding and sharing music interests. Now there is a shift back the other way:
What these changes to the musical framework of the social Web prelude, however, may well be a small trickle of a few names that grows quickly into an exodus of famous faces and voices intent on establishing more solitary existences on the Web. And if a trend to more individualized services among artists ensues, then we could in a couple of years potentially have a vast disarray of networks in our midst. Which, as many millions of social networkers today would probably determine, isn’t a prognosis many would find appealing.
Will Musicians’ Custom Networks Create Disarray On Social Web?
I can sympathize with both sides here. On one hand its a branding issue. No matter how big the artist is if you are looking at their info through Myspace then Myspace is winning the branding effort. Bringing the content into your own domain and website gives you the branding edge back, however you lose the advantage that Myspace brings = millions of users.
Michael Arrington talks about this in his post on FriendFeed and how its about owning your content:
…I think other people will want it too, is a place that they control where this information is aggregated. That may be right back at the blog for some people. For others it may be Facebook (who understands this fully). Wherever a person considers their home turf is where they’ll want all this data.
Here Arrington is talking about Data-Portability and how it will be and integral part of the web’s development. As we put more of our lives online we are going to need to be able to control it more and more. Just as we are starting to learn how to manage our music collections in digital form this grows exponentially with our words, pictures, and video as we put them online to share and discover with our friends and family.
What are you doing to manage your digital assets? Are you fine with posting them to another company trusting that they will always let you have them back? Or are you building your data fortress?
Will Musicians’ Custom Networks Create Disarray On Social Web?
FriendFeed, The Centralized Me, and Data Portability
