Own your online identity

This post from Fred Wilson echoes a lot of my thoughts. Whether you are posting to twitter, instagram, facebook, Medium, HuffPost, or anything else, it’s always worth remembering that you are leveraging someone else’s platform. That means you are renting it, not owning it. So, you are at the mercy of the platform. Whether in terms of content lifespan, deep linking or even just how your content is presented, you only have as much control as they allow.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t value in these platforms. There is tremendous value because they aggregate eyeballs, have excellent user interfaces and often host your content for free. Just be aware of the price you are paying (TANSTAAFL).

And always maintain a presence that you own if you care about your content. Repost all your content on your own site, so that even if the third party site goes away, you still have your work.  (If that’s not possible, print a PDF and save it in Google Drive, at a minimum.)

It’s not hard to buy a domain and set up a free google site (I wrote up instructions). You can use WordPress.com with your own domain for only a few dollars a month. Even if it isn’t as trafficked or as beautiful as a Facebook note, you control it. Once you’ve seen a few platforms rise and fall and/or change their business plan, you’ll be happy you used them for their leverage, but maintained as much control of your content as you could.