Why host my own?
August 26th, 2009 (Tech)
Social websites open the door for anyone to easily place their content online. This is great as it eases the barrier to entry, but think with me for a few minutes about the implications.
What if it goes down?
We have all seen Twitter’s growing pains over the past couple of years. As people are beginning to rely on Twitter more and more as a source of news, this becomes a bigger issue. It was interesting to watch a few weeks ago when one user’s (Cyxymu) Facebook, LiveJournal, Twitter and YouTube accounts were DDOSed and to see the effects on the various services. Twitter could not handle the load and was down the better part of the day. Facebook had some issues, but handled things better than Twitter (they isolated the attacks) while Google’s services didn’t take much of a hit at all (they have tons of servers and a nice redundant/self-healing network). A year ago, hardly anyone would have cared that Twitter was down, but now it is almost as if CNN went down.
Who owns my content?
That is a good question. Who owns your content when it is stored on a server that you don’t own. What would happen if Facebook went out of business tomorrow? Or Gmail? What would happen to all of your messages…all of your email? Sure, they may say that you own the content, but ultimately the control of it is in the hands of owners of the server where that content resides.
Finally….security
Of course, security is an issue that must be consider whether you are administering a server or somebody else is. MySpace is a great example of a network with very little concern for security. Accounts on that network were being compromised left and right. By the same token, Twitter can distribute a virus just as quickly as it can dispense the news. Security is always a concern when you have the control, but when you don’t, it is an even riskier issue.
Conclusion
There must be an answer to all of this madness. Well, I don’t think there is one elegant solution, but there certainly are options if you are comfortable with a *nix server.
- Twitalytic – Gina Trapani of Lifehacker is working on a tool to keep a local copy of your tweets (and related tweets from your friends) and do interesting things with them. Things like statistics, matching responses with the original tweets, etc… I’m trying it out on my server at the moment, and while it is definitely still an “alpha” product, it looks very promising. I think the end goal of it is to eventually be a federated Twitter network….when Twitter goes down, the Twitalytic nodes can still communicate amongst themselves (using pubsubhubbub of course).
- Fever – Fever is a feed reader that you run from your own server. Not only does it help you take control of the feeds you read, it also helps you read them more efficiently. I have not tried this yet as it is not free, but looks like an interesting option.
So, there you have it. My little rant on why you should host your own stuff. I don’t always follow my own advice, but it is something I have at least been thinking about lately. What are your thoughts or solutions to this problem? What apps do you use now to help you out until an ultimate solution is discovered?
I’m always learning something new from your technoblogs—I like the fact that you elicit help from others when you find a need for a new tool; you try it out, and give feedback—you should get paid for being the ‘alpha’ user!