Immovable Type
by Paul Fidalgo
Anil Dash tries to calm the Instapaper-vs.Readability animosity and makes a startling point about the reality of Web-based journaling:
. . . when I would spend my time flinging zingers at Matt Mullenweg about the merits of Movable Type vs. WordPress, you know who was winning? Mark Fucking Zuckerberg. Facebook won the blogging wars. The web became a more closed place than if either Movable Type or WordPress had evolved into the tool that powered social networking.
Oh my god he’s right. God damn it, he’s right.
I often wonder if this blog, or my sometimes-toying with Tumblr-type blogging, is essentially made redundant or irrelevant by Facebook and Twitter–heck, almost all the traffic to this blog comes from Facebook, meaning that just about everyone who reads it are people I in some way already know. Why bother maintaining a stand-alone website if it’s just an inconvenient detour from Facebook for all its readers? I’m curious what you think.
Hmm…I hear what you’re saying (I came here from G+ rather than Facebook, but that’s just substituting one Goliath for another). That being said, I think there’s a goodness to you posting here vs. in whatever walled garden (a goodness I haven’t done a good job of emulating myself recently…I need to get on it!). You “own” this…if myspace/friendster/facebook/tumbler/friendfeed disappears, your postings there go with it. I think there’s something important there. That being said, Anil hits on it when he points out we shouldn’t war amongst ourselves re: WordPress v. Movable Type v. Drupal v. etc…just be happen you’re out of the walled garden!! Encourage the wild growth…we need it.
Of course there’s that fellow Mike Elger or something who has this successful platform exclusively on G+, not bothering with anything else. Either way, whatever it was Blogger and freaking LiveJournal were supposed to do has been devoured by Facebook, hasnt it?
Remember MySpace? Remember ICQ? Remember Blogger? Remember LiveJournal?They used to be the Facebooks of their day. Now, not so much.Would you want your old content to be locked up there?I’m pretty sure in five or ten years time, people won’t be using Facebook anymore because the Next Big Thing will have arrived (maybe even two or three Big New Things will have come and gone in that time, who knows).But your site (with your own domain, with your own content,…) will still be there if you want it. Maybe this comment will even still be there, if Disqus survives…(And I’ll bet your site will be integrated via the NextBigThingAPI, so you won’t miss any of the fun…)