You'd think that Google would make it easy to export data and import into at least Blogger. I've made some great comments over the years but if I can just get my posts I'd be happy. Given the simple formatting supported by G+ you'd think it would be easy for them to do this. Bonus points for upload to Medium or any Markdown supporting platform. Maybe turn it into a Github Pages site?
This reminds me irresistibly of Multiply, which was destroyed by corporate greed in 2011-12. Those of us who were there passionately demanded that Multiply be saved. It didn't work of course.
ReplyDeleteHas anyone examined the takeout data? I feel like if any kind of usable "one click migrate" button is going to happen, it's going to have to come from the userbase. If nothing else, we can try screen scraping.
ReplyDeleteI've started to wonder why we need centralized "social networks" at all. Why can't we all have a blog, and they all have some standard API for getting posts - hello, basically RSS with a little sugar - and then decentralized services like blog readers on steroids, knit all the sources you are interested in into something useful like a "Friend feed". If you throw in a little bit of security magic (encryption, auth, etc.) plus some global pub-sub protocol for announcements you can implement private/closed groups. Any one of many free to use high-throughput blockchains (not ETH or BTC) can mediate a lot of that now. Or the industry could figure out defacto API/protocols to do it. The basic trick is to separate content - publish of which is very well understood, from the management of identity, groups and access permissions. That's really what Google should be doing if they want to destroy Facebook and bust the whole "social" wide open.
ReplyDeleteSimon Waddington I have a blog and find social networking toxic. However unless I can cross post links on social media, my readership numbers in the low tens (I've tried it, I know what I'm talking about). It's even more stark with my cartoon site, where unless I can post links on social media my readership is almost zero.
ReplyDeleteSimon Waddington pretty sure most people agree in varying degrees. For example Diaspora is designed to be run as multiple pods that talk to eachother. I've been following maidsafe for a while that should solve most of what you've discussed, but it's just taking sooooo long to get to where people can start building apps on top of it. Decentralized internet is becoming a hotter topic more recently. I'm trying to remember a book from a while back where the kids used their playstations to build a private decentralized internet.
ReplyDeleteAaron Coakley ditto for Maidsafe - and there are others doing similar things. There are of course complete publishing apps on blockchains like Steemit and Sapien. But although based on decentralised tech they are in their own way centralised. I'd rather see a lose collection of nodes that defacto form a social network via agreed upon protocols - just like servers plus HTTP is the web, and servers plus SMTP is email. Except in this case it is a higher level thing.
ReplyDeleteEventually someone will figure it out. To be honest I have not looked at Diaspora - it could be what I'm thinking of.
Bill Purkayastha well I think there is social networking for its own sake, and social networking for marketing. You really want to avoid the former and need the latter. The problem is to do the latter yourself you need to do the former. But you could use proxies who will do it for you - that could be a paid for service, or some dedicated super fans who follow your blog/website and post for you, or you could use an automated service something like Buffer that does it for you.
ReplyDeleteHowever you will then have the problem that social marketing is usually more effective if there is a direct 1:1 conversation with your readers/fans. That's what builds familiarity, trust, rapport, and loyalty. Of course some artists manage to stay distant, secretive, enigmatic... Is that how you see yourself?
I'm requesting Google beef up their Data Takeout tools and provide support to third-party sites, at least in the form of libraries for frequently-used languages such as Ruby, Python, Go, JS, PHP, etc.
ReplyDeleteLet's see where this gets us.
See: https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/jh9a7MjSpfg
Submitting similar feedback to Google is encouraged.
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