nan | 楠木

I’ve just started my Facebook experience a few days ago, partially due to the recent hype over the Facebook Apps platform. I felt that if I wanted to develop some expertise and become sort of a rookie observer of web2.0, well, I need to experience it personally.

Taken at face value, Facebook is an interesting playground. It’s got a nice set of features that makes it sticky and addictive, and it’s easy to see its potential as a gossip / rumor factory among friends. Good for 八卦, as we Chinese like to say.

Facebook’s Apps platform, on the other hand, is still just starting. You can see from the layout of my blog I’m still a widget / sidebar wannabe (would like to play around with all the fun and cool stuff but doesn’t have time for it), and there’s really little fancy stuff. However I certainly wouldn’t mind integrating my other web identities / applications through widgets. Therefore I really like the concept of widgets and the Facebook platform.

However, it’s still early days, not only for Facebook but perhaps for the web2.0 as a whole. For example, I certainly don’t mind showing off what great films I’ve seen recently, but it’s already been a frustrating experience for me. I have an account at IMDb, since that’s the place to go for films on the Internet. I have an account at some Chinese social network startup which I had used earlier to manage my film list. Now I have a new account at Flixster, via Facebook, since that’s the only movies tie-in application on Facebook currently worthwhile using.

These are (or at least were, in the case of the Chinese startup which I hate now, ever since it made a major change) all great websites, and they offer some complementary functions, but my frustration is that they are fully disconnected. I had strenuously entered my whole DVD catalog onto that Chinese site, only to find it unusable after the site’s rework. After that I decided to go back to IMDb and use that as my film database, but I haven’t bothered to re-enter my entire catalog. Now on Flixster / Facebook, I’m a reborn again.

So simply put, I have scattered pieces of my film viewing history on the Internet, and they cannot be interlinked. I’ve become very wary of investing any more of my time and energy, because it’s very uncertain how those sites will develop, and I don’t want to waste my time building up a film list on a website that will become obsolete next year, unless the web has evolved to a stage where there is some data exchange among the sites, or some form of portability.

I met the same problem with blogging which still hasn’t been fully resolved. Blog service providers are a plenty, but few offer good quality import / export functionality, which I now see as the key criteria. Because only with full import / export capabilities can I truly own my content, otherwise I’ll just be a slave to the BSP. And that’s why I’ve switched to hosting my own blog, using WordPress. I hate the fuss of upgrades and site maintenance, and my web hosting service truly sucks (there’s plenty of downtime already, and connection speed from at home is a crawl), but I’ve full control over my content, and I don’t think I’ll ever need to worry about importing posts one by one, simply because the old BSP had no export function whatsoever.

So I think as I come to an end in this not-very-structured ranting, my key concern with Facebook, or any web2.0 application, is really only one thing: how “liquid” the content I generated is，”liquid” meaning how easily can it be shared with or even switched to other platforms. Because I don’t want to type up the same “my favorite films list” on twenty different film sites, and I certainly don’t want to spend a few all-nighters merging my different blogs.