Manton Reece has finally launched the Kickstarter for his Micro.blog project (formerly Snippets.today). If, like me, you’re interested in the open web and a more decentralized future online you should back this project. I think Manton’s onto something big, something much more sustainable then the good old Twitter clones.

Hi, my name is Manton Reece, and I’m writing a book called Indie Microblogging. I’m also launching a brand new platform for microblogs.

[…]

I want to encourage more independent writing. To do that, we need better tools that embrace microblogs and the advantages of the open web. We need to learn from the success and user experience of social networking, but applied to the full scope of the web.

I first set out to build a new service just for microblogs. It has a timeline experience like a social network, with replies and favorites, but it’s based on RSS, with the main posts pulled from independent sites.

– Indie Microblogging: owning your short-form writing by Manton Reece — Kickstarter

Jeremy Keith writes about being on Twitter for ten years and comments on how things have changed on Twitter at large and, more importantly, on Twitter for him as he for the past few years has been treating it as nothing but a syndication service. I do the same and for the past few months I’ve visited Twitter.com very rarely and I no longer have any Twitter client installed on my iOS devices. It’s liberating to know that you own your content and as long as you keep your site running it’ll live on regardless of the rise and fall of various social networks.

I’m not sure if my Twitter account will still exist ten years from now. But I’m pretty certain that my website will still be around.

– Adactio: Journal—A decade on Twitter

That last paragraph rings so true to me. I intend to live for at least fifty more years and I hope my blog will be with me all the way. How many huge companies have existed for fifty years? How many of those have not changed in significant ways in fifty years? Do we really think that the social media of today will preserve our ideas, our quips and snapshots, and our memories – happy and sad –  for the foreseeable future? Or do we not care if they don’t?