Blaglash.com

Last night a tweet came through my twitterstream that grabbed my attention.It was sent by Ted Rheingold, the founder of dogster:

“Why doesn’t Apple’s MobileMe have social features?  Apple gets A LOT right, but it’s as if they want to skip the social revolution“

This is definitely a thought-provoking question, and one you could easily imagine coming from the founder of a social network for pets.  So I responded quickly and slept on it.

“@tedr I sometimes just need a place to store and back up my files. I don’t need friend requests or comments on every piece of data.“

(Please appreciate these links, as they were found in between many a fail whale.)

His point, on the most basic level, is a valid one.  It wouldn’t take much for Apple’s new MobileMe (which essentially is a file storage drive in the cloud to back up and sync your data to and from all of your devices) to add features we typically see in social networks:  sharing, commenting, stuff like that.

But what he–and a whole lot of other people I meet regularly–is ignoring are two very important facts of the web.

First:  Sometimes I just need to zip my files from my phone to my computer to my external hard drive to my ipod back to my phone.  It’s a convenience.  The service is there so I don’t lose my data.  I don’t necessarily want to worry about checkboxes to enable or disable sharing and people sifting through all of my files.  Emphasis on “necessarily.”

Second (and most important in the long run):  The web is a social network.  It seems obvious, but read it again and repeat it with me.  The web is a social network.

Facebook allows me to keep in touch with my friends, but only in a weird mashup-style conglomeration of the things I used in middle school to keep in touch with my friends.  My comment board is what was then called a forum (complete with avatars!), my messages are either emails or what we used to call PMs,  my “chat” is what was then referred to as “IM,” etc, etc, etc.

This obviously goes for Dogster, too.

Dogster is an asset because they’ve built a community of pet lovers around their technology.  But could those pet lovers communicate with each other if Dogster disappeared in the morning?  Of course.

And this isn’t because the web is disaggregated or moving into Web 3.0 or any other nonsense.

It’s because the web is a technology that allows multiple computers to connect with each other and share information.

I have more than enough services to allow me to share files and data with certain friends and passing acquaintances.  Sometimes I just need a service that will allow me to back up my shit.  From there I’ll decide where to put them, who to share them with, and what third parties I will trust with the information.

Nobody’s ignoring any kind of revolution here.  And the idea that it is these big clumsy “social networks” which have created some kind of revolution by mashing up the technology that is the very essence of the web is kind of  odd.