This would make a great blog post
Dave Winer will sometimes link to the above image as both a reminder, and perhaps chastisement, that we should own our words and our creations.
But, despite what the terms and conditions on various services say, the practicalities of this are harder than ever.
Social media has increasingly taken the conversation away from blogs and we respond in situ because, if we don't, people are unlikely to follow links to read our response.
Ain't nobody got time for that 1
We suffer from the inherent importance of context in our fast paced, online world.
Thoughts & fragments
We have many thoughts sent out as tweets, Facebook posts, and comments or replies; fragments, quickly captured and just as quickly forgotten, when they should be more deeply explored and exist as complete entities rather than throw-away artefacts.
This was all brought to mind when I saw Tweedium, a tool to combine tweet storms into Medium posts. While many of our tweets etc. are frivolous we must recognise the importance of things we say in the social sphere and that they should have a more prominent, permanent position instead of being washed away in the stream.
Blogging and social need a reboot but this is unlikely to happen as the networks want to retain control even as they advocate openness.
We need enhanced interoperability. We need to be able to write where we want and flag it as a response to something elsewhere, to embed what we have written in situ so that links don't have to be followed.
How do we do it?
There has to be a culture of sharing and embedding social objects: an extended "article" card type in Twitter to display full posts - maybe the AMP version of a page; cross-publishing a blog post to Medium and then retrospectively marking it as a reply to something else, for example.
There are ways it could be achieved if only there is the will.
We may have linking and cross-posting but we need the networks to develop and adopt tools allowing a more flexible migration of data, if not between the different social platforms, at least between platforms and external sites.
