Web 2.0 and Personal KM: Rude Lessons in Impermanence

As I fired up my browser for the first time today, I was hopeful, but again, I saw this:

 
 

Not only has my default start-up site been down since some time in November, but the error message has gone from the slightly ominous "We're experiencing technical difficulties" type (below) to the vastly scarier, generic error message pictured above.

 

I know it's been reported before, but Pageflakes, the page where I aggregated all of the blogs I care about most dearly, along with my newsfeeds, to get a quick, one-stop view of most of the information I care about the most, seems to be gone and not coming back.

Because it was an aggregator, it's not like any of my information (other than configuration of Pageflakes itself) has gone missing, but I'm without a tool I use literally every day to organize the web properties I pay attention to.

Through this process, I feel like I've learned a small lesson about the impermanence of information in the Web 2.0 world, and personal knowledge management.  There's been a lot written about how digital information never goes away if someone wants it badly enough (especially as the Wikileaks saga continues to unfold), but I've been made rudely aware of the opposite:  how easily Web 2.0 properties can go away, or evolve in ways that we don't want, leaving us with little recourse but to find new tools to connect with others and consume information.

The lessons for me:

1. Invest my time and information in brands that I can trust, and ones with scale to last (note:  those two attributes can be at cross-purposes as power corrupts)
2. Consider off-line tools and open standards (a client-side RSS reader/aggregator installed on my local computer, like FeedDemon for example)
3. It's hard to complain about changes in, or termination of, a free service, but people do it anyway. Being change-averse is part of human nature.
4. Learn to live with the transience.  If Twitter went away tomorrow, and with it my over 2,000 tweets and 300+ followers, what would I do?  Probably pick up the phone or make time to visit the important ones in person to stay connected.  I'd certainly process less information than I do now, but likely in more depth.  Maybe not a bad trade-off.

[update:  12/11/2010, 10:30 pm -- wouldn't you know it's back up?  Let's see for how long.]

Comments

[Tom Catalini]

It's a tricky landscape sometimes... even "free" can have a price. I was a casual user of drop.io, but even paid users were shut down rather rapidly when they were bought by Facebook. Users had 6-weeks to get their data, but the solution itself evaporated...

Here's a snippet from their announcement (Oct 29th):

"As of this week, people will no longer be able to create new free drops, but you’ll be able to download content from existing drops until Dec. 15. Paid user accounts will still be available through Dec. 15 and paid users will be able to continue using the service normally. After Dec. 15, paid accounts will be discontinued as well.

Please download your information before Dec. 15 – we plan to delete it after that time. No user data or content will be transferred to Facebook, and we’ll send out e-mails to everyone to remind them about the service closing."

[Jack Vinson]

I haven't played with Pageflakes, but you should be able to export your subscriptions and slurp them into something else. I've been using Feedly lately, which is a Firefox plugin that reads from my Google Reader subscriptions. Talk about a couple layers.

[Mike Gil]

@Tom: An expression I hear occasionally (more in reference to SharePoint Foundation, part of Windows Server) is that it's "free like a puppy." Chris Anderson's musings on "Free" tell us that free has a price, even/especially in the Web 2.0 world, no?

@Jack, I will take a look at Feedly if they make it for IE (MSFT is my stack, for the most part, so I'll try that first). Appreciate the tip!

[Mike Gil]

Update at 12/17/10: Pageflakes is back on-line, but some leaked information from Yahoo yesterday indicates that they are sunsetting their social bookmarking product Del.icio.us, on which I have over 1,300 bookmarks. More of the same...

Details at http://mashable.com/2010/12/16/leaked-slide-shows-yahoo-is-killing-delicious-other-web-apps/

[Dan Lloyd]

I tried Netvibes for a while, but just switched to a hosted SharePoint 2010 account with SherWeb. I'm hoping that a to do list on my home page will get me off the couch on the weekends (it's early days!). I also figure that since SherWeb has been around for a while and has a revenue stream, my data should be a little safer in the cloud.

[Mike Gil]

Thanks, Dan. I'll give SherWeb a shot. Hadn't heard of it before. Please let me know how effective it is in getting you off the couch, as I am in dire need of a solution to that problem as well (see also: winter, New England, snowmageddon). :-)