Sunday, October 25, 2009

Yet About Your Freedom

The hype of having everything through mashup services, has a big impact in your freedom. Which most of the time is overwhelmed by Internet mass.

Using the "great" argument of not having to setup or create an account, sounds very nice in a first analysis, as it might seen that you are not getting another service to be attached to.
Well, it turns out that this is not true, first because you are probably exposing the information and account settings from the previous service to the new server, the only difference is that you don't need to do that manually.
But what really makes it really worst, is the attachment factor, that is created on interdependent services like applications inside facebook, orkut, twitter etc...
Once you are using a service that depends and requires other, and this service is really important for you, it attaches you extending you level of dependency through the overhead of being stuck sometimes with services that you no longer need, or never needed.

Think before getting attached to interdependent services. Make also sure the level of account exposure is really defined in a proper and clear way, as most of these integrations are not clear at all about account exposure among different services.


XMPP can support your freedom by exposing all these services through a protocol, which does the integration in a open and defined method, making you able to choose and define dependencies and exposure of your data.
In that sense you might even start your services through Google Wave, and later decide to stop and provide through your own XMPP network. Or even having Intranet services integrated in a safe and limited network.

Powering your freedom!

2 comments:

  1. Oh, yes?

    Say if I use Google to store my contact data, let's say, I add 100 people to my roster. Then, later, I realize that Google is evil, and don't want to feed Skynet anymore with my data.

    So I want to move. Like: could you please redirect every conversation to my home server jabber account? ergh, no? So, should I get a multi-account IM client, like Psi or Gaim, and add them there?

    Unfortunately, moving from one jabber server to the other has very little difference than from, say, moving from yahoo messenger to msn.

    (So no, you can't decide to stop providing your services through Wave: you're stuck with it as much as you'd be stuck like on any other netwokr.)

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  2. Of Course the ability to choose which of these servers you want to choose is what we are talking about. Including the possibility to change from one to another. Yes, you CAN stop providing your service through wave, and move to your server without any hassle.

    Another miss-concept is that XMPP is only about IM. We are talking about services defined in an open, standard and defined way.

    Talking about contact list, you can have your account set in your private or trusted server and federate with other servers, without the necessity of storing your data on it.

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