Forget MySpace and FaceBook – Make It YourSpace

The Internet is a very strange place. For one thing, numbers seem to matter to people more than they do anywhere else. In life, most of us get by with a handful of close friends and a sphere of dwindling influence that stretches out from there. We build relationships through personal contact. We keep in contact with those that matter and ignore those we have little in contact with.

There was a time when the Internet was more like that, but it was hard. You could set up your own website, populate it with a message board and link to the sites of your connections to create networks. There were webrings leading from site to site and slowly repositories of links, often out of date, grew on extension pages of websites around the net.

I’m going to jump way ahead now. In those old days, you had to either know someone willing to do your web work for you, or spend the time to learn some skills. Ugly sites abounded, dripping bloody letters and bouncing animated gifs, flickering flames and bad font choices abounded. Eventually we added in the blog, and the message boards (while still there) cut way back.

With blogs we developed sites like Blogger and Wordpress and everyone wanted one. The blog allowed you to be up and running in no time with at least a passable design and a place to generate that huge blogroll of folks you “connected” with – though of course they were (and still are) filled with reciprocal links and places you never actually go. The blog lets you express yourself and get comments on your work quickly. You can check the visitor stats and start to compute your “influence”.

Somewhere along the way, someone got the idea for sites like MySpace. Give people a blog, but also give them a way to build lists of “friends” – and require people to register their own “space” in order to participate and not be left out. This plays right into the Internet hive mentality. Again, most of the actual work and learning is removed from the occasion – anyone can do it. Then, when everyone is gathered in a self-sustaining mob – bombard them with advertisements, let out the predators and the hackers. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

Facebook is just a modified and less garish version of MySpace, and Linked-In, while a bit more useful on a business contact management level, is another version. What I propose is probably a bit radical, but give me a minute here.

I have my own self-hosted web sites. A self-hosted WordPress site is only slightly harder to maintain than a site over at WordPress, but you have complete control over it. If you have your own website, whether it’s a blog, or a full blown PHP-Generated monster, you can create your own community. With the addition of a couple of things like Twitter, you can build your own list of connections – people you actually connect with – and if you provide something worth reading, they will come back and read what you write.

You might have 15,000 friends on Facebook, but I doubt more than a dozen of them have time in their busy worrying over sending little green plants and karma back and forth for connecting – they have to tend to their own huge flock of “friends”. It’s silly. Facebook and MySpace have become giant repositories for all of the things people used to forward endlessly in e-mail to waste time with…how is that helpful?

Here’s my suggestion in a nutshell. Buy your own domain name. Set up your own web space. If you don’t know how, either learn, or hire someone for the initial setup. If you go with something like WordPress you won’t have to pay continually – it’s easy to maintain. Write meaningful things in your blog. Keep your content up to date. Entertain people and provide a reason to come back. Build yourself a contacts list – either through integrating a social network like Twitter, or on your links page. Visit other individual sites and interact. Create your own community that you control and make your content available to everyone – not just those willing to sign up and join a club.

Don’t let some big faceless entity be the only recipient of funds from your hard work. Create YOUR space. And by the way…welcome to mine.

-DNW

Written by David Niall Wilson - Visit Website
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