Lucian Marin
A dash in space-time continuum
Back in 2009 I wanted to make a change in the way I use social networks. I simply disconnected from everything. It was a good thing to do because I managed to spare myself some time, otherwise it could be wasted on stalking pretty girls on Facebook. I’m joking, of course. No, I probably didn’t joke, but I’m sure you’ll get the idea.
It comes a time when a social site reach its maximum attention span and everybody tends to ignore why they came there in the first place. The place becomes unwanted for people that actually cared for what the social sites stood in the beginning.
A little bit of history
Before Twitter, Flickr was the only social network I needed. I was using it for everything: designs, posters, mock-ups, photographs, sets, experiments, even embarrassing updates from time to time. Then Facebook came along and promised to be the best at it. After some time I was disappointed by two facts: people joined Facebook because it was cool, not because they wanted to be part of a community. Second reason was that Flickr was acquired by Yahoo! — they didn’t get the fact that Flickr was a network of small communities that could interact between each others.
Nowadays we have another monster in the house which is called Google Plus. I was using it for a few months. It was really cool and addictive in the beginning because I could create myself some small communities called “circles” and interact nicely with each of them. But suddenly people are joining Google Plus in masses and all those small communities are now dispersed and they will increase to sparse to the point when nobody will give a crap anymore.
Dash and moving forward
Dash comes to cover a need for people that are interested on my online activities. There is a girl that was trying to be up-to-date with everything I did on the web. I created the “dashboard” to make her life easier. Strangely, it makes my life easier too. Because now I’m aware of what services I really need, the usage on various social networks and the openness of others.
Regarding the usage, I noticed that I no longer need Tumblr to showcase photos I take because its functionality was replaced altogether by Instagram. Also noticed that Flickr back in its glory days is now replaced by Dribbble, Instagram and Twitter.
Regarding the openness, I would have liked to include a feed of my favorites on SoundCloud. But they didn’t provide this basic feature. Instead you have to create a developer account, receive a token, understand the API and then get a XML of those bloody favorite tracks. This is not how the future should look like. The “big guys” of the industry should be the first to promote tools like RSS feeds for their users. Only a true open social network has a future, the others will cease to exist at some point.