Using a web service instead of managing your own domain name opens you to risk.
I just finished reading Adrian Short’s editorial about Facebook’s Open Graph and I think domainers will find it interesting.
It’s a long and well argued editorial and I certainly don’t want to try summarizing it. But from a domain name perspective, Short argues the difference between a domain name and social networks. When you host your content and business on a domain name you essentially own it. You can take it with you. It can traverse technologies.
When you own a domain you’re a first class citizen of the web. A householder and landowner. What you can do on your own website is only very broadly constrained by law and convention…
Not so with what you do on a social network or a web service:
If you use a paid-for web service at someone else’s domain you’re a tenant. A second class citizen. You don’t have much control. You’ll probably have to live with your landlord’s furniture and decoration and a restrictive set of rules. Your content will only exist at these URLs for as long as you keep paying the same people that monthly fee and for as long as your provider stays in business. Experience tells me that this isn’t very long. As a paying customer you’ll have a few rights under your contract, but they probably won’t amount to very much. When you leave you’ll probably be able to get your data back in a useful format, but when you put it back on the web somewhere else you’ll lose all your inbound links, search engine rankings and many of your visitors…
I don’t want to quote too much of the editorial, but I think you’ll agree with most of it.
I tend to agree with Short. Although I can think of circumstances where leaning on a social network instead of your own identity might be worth it. More on that later…
Hal Meyer says
Pardon me, would you have any Grey Poupon?
John says
Before FaceBook started making all these changes I was in the camp of some businesses such as restaurants being able to not have a site for a while. Not now. They and all these other services are just going to compliment one’s main site, which needs to be .Com. Timely Post.
DR.DOMAIN says
Great article by Mr. Short.I’m biased here (obviously)…but I think the first half of his observation(s) nails it: You want to have control of your image/message…and the “open web” with a domain name is the way that happens.That common working stiffs need only FB & Twitter is fine.Business people are all I really care about.Better to add FB & Twitter presence to your domain AFTER establishing the “open web” site than doing it the other way around.Someone who wanted a domain that I own found that out the hard way last month.
Poor Uncle says
This story reminds me of whether you want to own your own store by a deserted road side selling ice cream or have it inside a large popular mall with a lot of traffic?
I guess it depends if you are in the business of selling ice cream or hawking real estates huh?
Some of these analogy really cracks me up. If you don’t own porno.com or the like you are not a first class citizen period. But you still need to put food on the table, don’t you? 🙂
Rob Sequin says
I’ve known this since Blogger started.
I have seen and still see many people who have an active blog on Blogger.
It will be very difficult now for them to move away from Blogger URL to their own domain.
Build your business and your brand on your own domain and expand out from there. Simple really.
Stephen says
Short.com is up for sale
patrick says
A good domain has never lost it’s marketing value ,there have been many great articles about giving your brand and marketing up to social networking sites look at what facebook charges for marketing so start with your own marketing platform(domain) and use social sites to promote it further that way you have the control not the other way around.Remember they are there to make money your money and you can do well enough without them.