As I predicted 20 plus years ago, social network services will come and go, your actual networks will become diluted by them, and at some point you won’t have access to your network data. It’s time to go offline with Markdown notes.
This past week as I audited and cleansed my social network data I was reminded how much has changed over the past 20 years. But first, some reflections on social network services, my adventures within them, and soon without them.
This is a very long post. If you just want to know what I’m doing now, skip to the “In the end” section.
Here today. Gone tomorrow.
Many social network (SN) sites have come and gone and new ones pop up seemingly weekly. More will disappear over time or become less popular. Your friends and connections will leave. It’s not if, it’s when.
Whether it be as a result of a data breach, finicky consumers, financial woes, or other reasons, these sites will fade into obscurity and with them, your personal network data.
As for my personal experiences with SN services, I’ve tried a lot of them over the years and many are gone. Let me go back just a little further in time. Not as far back as my Palm Pilot, but close.
In the beginning
Circa 2002 one of my many crazy ideas was that we could visualize, manage, and track our social networks with software just like we do with computer networks.
As I was envisioning how this could be done, I stumbled upon the science of SN [1]. I was so excited that there was already years of science behind SN. I kept a lot of the research files and I aim to go back and refresh my memory since I’m still passionate about the field of study. Here’s a screenshot with evidence of decades old PDFs in my Nextcloud server.
In 2003 I started a company to create an ego network management solution that would realize my vision. Little did I know the tsunami that was coming in this area.
As part of my research for the startup, I actively tested and analyzed every SN service that came along. I was able to connect with some very interesting people in industry, education, and SN research. It was the early days for SN services.
I learned as much as I could about the data that each online service tracked, how their user interfaces worked or didn’t. It was a thrill to be part of the beginning of this era in online SN tools.
In the end, our SN software venture failed to raise funding and we shut it down. To this day no service exists close to what I’d envisioned. One that showed promise was Plaxo.
Plaxo-n, Plaxo-ff
Remember Plaxo? It was co-founded by Sean Parker. I joined the service in Sep 2003 and this is what it looked like back then.
I uploaded all of my contacts and was on it until 2011 but stopped actively using the service much earlier than that. This old email from them shows I had over 12,000 contacts.
Plaxo was unique as it sent emails to your contacts asking them update their information. This would save you the hassle of maintaining the data. It was a great idea, but turned into a spam generator of sorts and drove people nuts.
Plaxo was bought by Comcast in 2008 and shutdown in 2017.
In 2004, Parker saw a site called “The Facebook” on the computer of his roommate’s girlfriend, who was a student at Stanford. Parker had experience in the social networking industry as an early advisor to Friendster and its founder, Jonathan Abrams, for which he was given a small amount of stock in 2003. Parker met with Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin, and a few months later joined the five-month-old company as its president. According to Peter Thiel, Parker was the first to see potential in the company to be “really big”, and that “if Mark ever had any second thoughts, Sean was the one who cut that off”. —
[2]
Speaking of Facebook, been there, done that, and more than once.
Faceless book
I joined Facebook early on, then left, then went back on due to FoMo, and then left again. I maintain a few accounts using aliases for hobbies such as NoteApps or for buying and selling things.
When exiting Facebook I gamified it and had people guessing if they’d be the Last Friend Standing. On the way out I also took some of “my data” with me. Manually transcribing that data took a lot of time but I’m glad I did.
OK, sure Facebook still exists and they have an obscenely large user base but many people have left or are inactive. I predict it will eventually disappear or morph into something else so they can keep ad pushing.
What a Yahoo!
I joined Yahoo! in Jan 2001 using their email service. Later they added a Groups feature and I setup or joined several alumni communities with over 2,000 people. Ironically, these were folks that I’d worked with at companies which had also disappeared! I removed my account in 2019.
Sure enough in 2020, Yahoo! shut down their Groups service [3] and along with it all of the communications with ex-colleagues were gone forever. Well, not for me since I archived key notes in HAL before they shutdown.
But Twitter still exists, right?
Well…
Tweets, now Xeets?
I enjoyed using Twitter for a while and removed my personal account in 2014. I have 9 pseudonym accounts on the service right now: a couple for active hobbies including @noteapps and some for squatting re. future hobbies like @pomoapps. These are mostly to broadcast updates and have very little interaction, i.e. not very social!
Who would’ve predicted that Elon would take over Twitter, rebrand it ‘X’, and make it his own platform? [4]
You likely don’t care if X dies if you use it for fleeting tweets (xeets?) but if you run a business, built a sizeable following, or setup a community like @music [5] and you lost the connections or content, then that could be a material impact.
Twitter is dead. Long live X. What about Link-a-ding?
Link-a-ding
At this point, the only site that I use daily and with my real name is LinkedIn or, as my mother-in-law calls it, “Link-a-ding”.
I joined LinkedIn early on and quit in 2012 as it really wasn’t my network, it hadn’t helped me much, and I am always worried about my privacy. Too many people had access to my data, and me theirs.
Of course I also gamified my exit from LinkedIn by doing connection countdowns while others were still counting up. I removed 100s of people at a time and had people guessing who’d be the last. The last connection I removed was my wife.
Without access to LinkedIn, it was hard for me to know where many of my ex-colleagues were working. Those so-called “weak” connections. I also wanted to leave the company I was at and LinkedIn was the place for recruiters to find talent. So, I signed up again 6 years later in 2018.
Fast forward 5 years and I’m considering leaving again. A few weeks ago I purged over 600 people from my “network” and I still have over 1,100 “connections”. Why leave?
The stories of nefarious people, bots pretending to be people, and fake jobs is increasing. I predicted SN services and especially LinkedIn would be prime targets for identify theft. What better a place to grab large amounts of employment and education history, names of people’s connections, and their birthdays?
As a past victim of ID theft, I really don’t want to go through that again. If crap happens to enough people, then another SN bites the dust, and another one will be gone. It’s not if, but when.
You’re crazy! These companies are way too big to disappear.
Wrong!
But they’re too big to disappear!
Before you say sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are too big to disappear, let me tell you about a company that I worked for. It wasn’t a SN company but it was big: Nortel.
The downfall of Nortel shocked the world when it imploded circa 2001. At the time they had 125,000 employees globally and were one of the leading telecom research and development companies in Canada. It’s gone. Poof!
If you don’t believe that SN companies or their services will disappear, here’s a few other examples.
In 2008, Hi5, MySpace, and Friendster were close competitors to Facebook, yet by 2012 they had virtually no market share. The case of MySpace is remarkable, considering that in 2006 it temporarily surpassed Google as the most visited website in the US.
[6]
I never used MySpace or Friendster beyond competitive analysis but I did use Google+. That service didn’t last long and ended up in the Google Graveyard [7] along with 277 other services.
Sure, but I can get my network data out of these services at any time, right?
Well… it depends.
But, it’s my data!
It’s not really your data. The SN services allow you to do an export but you don’t get all of the data, you don’t get it in a format that’s useful to non-techies, and you can’t import to another network.
For example, when you export your data from LinkedIn, you don’t actually get your network. You get the chat messages that you had with people but no contact information for them, no photos, no connection information between them, nor anything else useful.
PSA: I strongly encourage you to export periodically from any online service that you use and store the export somewhere safe and secure.
To try out the LinkedIn export, use their “Export your data” feature. [8]
On this day
I really like the “on this day” feature in several of the photo services that remind me what happened on this day last year or in previous years.
Having that same capability local, on my own devices, and available offline would be great. I’d be able to reflect on notes about what happened in my life and other people’s lives on a given day, month, or year and be able to remind myself or them. That would be really helpful and interesting.
To make this possible I need all of my notes and media in one place so I can search, link, and analyze them. Then, someday someone or something can summarize them for me when I can no longer read, communicate, or type. That time too will come. It’s not if, but when.
I can envision something like this in the retirement home:
“Morning Stone! On this day back in 2002, you met with Janet and talked about the future of social networks. She had just started dating a guy named Derek who had to buy you Swiss Chalet to shut you up!”
That could keep my synapses firing, spark a memory, and most importantly, make me smile. What the HAL, that’s cool!
So, what is HAL?
As I mentioned earlier in this post, circa 2002 I created a startup with a few friends and colleagues to realize a vision that I had for a private, peer-to-peer SN solution.
The venture was a blast, I learned a lot, and the idea itself is still a good one that no one has fully implemented. In the end, the venture failed but the idea lives on.
After failing, ahem learning, I created the SN tool on my own. I’m not a great Developer but I get by. Originally I called it RN as an acronym of the company name and years later I renamed it HAL.
I’ve maintained my social network in HAL for 20 years. I originally hosted the software on a domain and in the cloud but to save money it now runs in my secure “private cloud” i.e. in my basement.
It’s taken a ludicrous amount of work to code HAL over the years and so many hours to track and maintain my network data. Call me crazy but most of the data was captured manually. I’ve enjoyed this hobby and it’s kept my brain occupied during the good times and the bad.
So far, HAL has been the SN service that I’ve used the longest.
But HAL will die too!
Heaven or HAL?
Exactly. Just like the other SN services, HAL will die and that’s a good thing.
I considered integrating HAL with LinkedIn and other SN services but that’s too costly and some of the services require access to my code. They also don’t want you to take copies of “your” data and I understand that from a privacy perspective since it’s really hard to separate your data from someone else’s in a social network.
Besides being a support system for my bad memory and a way to manage and track my ego network, coding HAL fired up my neurons many evenings and weekends after work where meetings and PowerPoint had killed them during the workdays.
I will miss coding HAL but I will likely replace that with analysis of my SN Markdown files.
You have that many files?
To show the number of people I “know” — many loose connections and many I have yet to meet — here’s a screenshot of the counts of people (person) and notes (keynote) in my HAL database:
That’s a lot of files but offline is the way to go and that’s where I’m going.
Offline or bust
As the world gets back to normal, I’m meeting people in analog form once again and I’m really enjoying it. I didn’t realize how much I missed the one-on-one coffee chats.
As always, I reflect after each chat, track the followups that I committed to, and note any key updates about the person.
The live networking has re-invigorated my passion for my ego social network hobby. Over the past month I’ve been working on a tool to export my network data from HAL into individual and atomic Markdown files.
In parallel, I’ve also been working on chat message history to Markdown converters. So far I have developed converters for Signal, SMS Backup, and LinkedIn exports.
OK, so what is Markdown?
What is this Markdown thing?
Markdown is basically plain text with some extra text characters to make part of the text stand out. It’s really simple to create, it’s human readable, and it can be accessed and rendered in many tools.
If you ever typed *this*, that’s Markdown and results in this being italicized.
If you ever typed **that**, well that’s Markdown too and results in `that` being bolded.
Want to create a bulleted list? Type - this is a bullet and voila!
- this is a bullet
It’s that simple and elegant and you know enough to use Markdown. There are oodles of tools that support Markdown. My favorites are Obsidian [9] and Drafting for Android [10].
With my Markdown chat converters and the one that I intend to create for email, I’ll have all of my text conversations safe in a place that I can control. I will be able to search across them when offline, off the grid, out of the clouds, and on any device. Someday soon I will be able to apply a local “AI” to them. Besides being human and computer readable, why else Markdown?
I see Markdown as the Eveready Bunny of computer files. It will outlive every social network site, it will outlive me, and you.
Not that anyone will want to read our notes after we pass on but I do expect some people would be interested. Just this past weekend a friend asked if I could write her epitaph after I converted her HAL profile to Markdown and then to PDF.
Writing epitaphs was not one of the use cases I’d considered with HAL but I had an idea to have a bot that, after our death, would send a profile of each of my connections to them with all of the communications we’d had over the years. Creepy and cool at the same time!
So yes, it’s possible to create an epitaph with Markdown and AI. It would remove some stress and burden in funeral planning 😂.
What’s great about text files is that any notes you’ve created, even with the earliest computer, are still readable today. Your Friendster data? Not so. Switching from Android to Apple or vice versa? Good luck.
But I don’t need notes since I have a great memory!
Well, this story is not about you! 😂
Why so many notes?
The reason for keeping so many notes is that I have a really, really bad memory and it will only get worse as I get older. My wife says it’s a selective memory and I suppose that’s true as I do remember some things! More precisely my memory is unreliable and unpredictable. My notes are the opposite, they don’t forget.
Before email and the Internet we used to write letters. Yes, we wrote letters with a physical pen and paper. Some of us kept those handwritten letters and greeting cards to look back at later. Being a techie, I scanned most of mine into PDFs or images and stored them in Nextcloud.
About 20 years ago with the change to digital, our conversations ended up being everywhere and nowhere at the same time. They will be lost forever once the “clouds” drift away. No rainbows here.
Seeing how Dementia has affected my parents and in-laws, I foresee a day when I will remember fewer and fewer things. I suppose we aren’t designed to remember everything and in some ways, we need to forget. I’d just like the option to remember or at least be reminded. I don’t have that option now given my memory problems.
Moving to Markdown
I considered modernizing HAL but instead I decided to migrate everything to individual Markdown files so I can use Obsidian all of the time and my notes live on.
Here’s my post on the idea Keeping track of people and connections in Obsidian.
In prep for my “big export to Markdown”, I purged the data that I had in HAL for old social network account IDs. These are dead or dying SN platforms some that I mentioned already: Google+, Plaxo, BBM, Classmates, AOL, and MySpace. Here are the counts of people I had IDs for on each service.
But Obsidian will die too!
In the end
Yes, Obsidian will also disappear at some point yet my notes will live on. As long as there are computers and power to power them, there will be a text editor or robots to read my Markdown files. If there’s no power, well that’s another problem.
In the meantime, I love Obsidian and it should outlive me!
As a trial run, last weekend I converted 700 connections in HAL to Markdown using my tool. This was a subset of people that I’d kept track of from a single company that we all worked at almost 30 years ago: Nortel!
The Markdown files include information on who they know (that I know about), where they are now (if I know), what they know (skills that I know of and witnessed), what the to like (interests and hobbies), and some key milestones.
It was amazing to watch my Obsidian vault render the graph of connections as they connections were being exported.
Finally, and thanks for your patience… here’s what a part of my social network looks like in Obsidian!
It’s so incredible that my concept from 20+ years ago is finally coming to reality using plain text Markdown files and a tool developed by a couple that went to the University of Waterloo!
I’m looking forward to the next steps of continuing to cleanse my data, finishing the export code, getting my entire network into Obsidian [9], and exiting LinkedIn.
Goodbye Social Networks, hello Markdown!
References
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/social-network-analysis
- Sean Parker, Wikipedia
- Yahoo Announces Shutdown Of Social Platform Yahoo Groups, 2020–10–12
- Track Twitter Analytics, Social Blade
- X, Formerly Twitter, Seizes @Music Handle From Its Longtime User, Who Is ‘Super Pissed’, Rolling Stone, 2023–08–03
- The rise of social media, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina
- killedbygoogle.com, Cody Ogden
- Download my data, LinkedIn
- Obsidian v1.0.5 scores 7/10, NoteApps.ca, 2021–12–11
- https://www.noteapps.ca/drafting/
Steps to export your data from LinkedIn
If [8] doesn’t work, follow these steps:
- Click here and if that doesn’t work, click the
Meicon at the top of LinkedIn and selectSettings & Privacyfrom the drop-down menu - Click the
Data Privacyon the left rail - Under “How LinkedIn uses your data”, click
Get a copy of your data - Select the data that you’re looking for and
Request archive
