Monday, May 17, 2010

The Shlomi Cloud!

Facebook owns my photos, Google owns my emails/documents/contacts, LinkedIn owns my network, Delicious owns my favorites, and even my real URLs are not in my possession (but by the Tiny URLs of the world)…

Did I totally lose it?

I recently read about a new startup offering us to manage all our social networking sites from one place. Finally you can move pictures from Picasa to Facebook and then to Google docs, all from a single location. Kind of nice, right? While it is probably very useful (haven’t tried it yet), I say - not another aggregator please!

Instead I want to use a hub and spoke model and have my own Shlomi cloud (clouds are exceptionally trendy these days) where I own/control/manage/store eeevvvverything.

I can define my network (tree/forest of relationships) in one place and carry it (or a subset of it) with me to different social network sites (today to Facebook or LinkedIn, and tomorrow to the next big thing).

I can store all my photos, documents, etc. and delete them whenever I want, knowing no zombie copies are floating in the WWW wilderness.

I can create my personas and manage them, deciding which persona to present and when.

And all the great social networking sites can focus on the services they provide while referencing my identity from the Shlomi Cloud.

What do you think? Is it time to start the MyPersonalCloud.org movement, where everyone can create, own and control his own piece of identity?