Screw Facebook, make your own social network!

Facebook’s recent new features, including their so-called “instant personalization”, aim to make Facebook the social backbone of the entire web.

I don’t need that.

I can’t speak for others, but I’m no extrovert. No matter how many people I may be Facebook friends with, the reality is that I don’t maintain relations with that many people. What’s more, I’m not convinced that you regularly talk to each and every one of your 130 friends. I’m fairly certain that you have a much smaller circle of people you actually spend time with, and you friended the rest so you could have an easy point of contact with them on the off chance you needed it. Not so they could see how many points you got on the last game you played on Kongregate, or leaf through your embarrassing Pandora musical choices, or know when you’re out of the house.

So what do I need a social backbone for? Nothing. I certainly don’t want it to constantly increase the amount of information it deliberately leaks. And thus, I propose we move our social networking activity out of entities like Facebook, and into ones we control ourselves. I propose we decentralize social networking, since if sharing is the social norm, we’re perfectly capable of sharing only to whom we care about.

You see, we all have the power to make our own social networks. And I’m not talking about something like Ning–I’m talking about a little site that you only reveal to a few specifically chosen people, and no one else. That is, a tiny communication platform where you know everyone else there, and where, since the entire site is secret in the first place, there will never be the possibility of anyone seeing something you didn’t want them to see.

As it happens, I did just that about six months ago with a small group of friends, and it’s working beautifully. No, I won’t link it here–that would defeat the purpose! I will, however, explain how I did it, and how you can do the same. It’s really not hard at all, and can be done by anyone in their spare time. All you need is a WordPress blog and your friends.

The WordPress P2 Theme

I assume WordPress needs little introduction. If you don’t know what it is, it’s blog software. That’s really it. Except, it’s extremely easy to configure and use, it’s open source, and it’s malleable enough to shape into almost any kind of content management system you can imagine–from webcomics to artist portfolios to forums. We’re after something like the latter.

The P2 theme should look familiar to anyone who’s used Twitter. It’s got an entry box at the top for typing out a quick post or uploading or linking in pictures or videos, and below it aggregates all the recent posts and displays threaded comments under them. It even brings up other users’ posts and comments in real time as they get posted. And, unlike Twitter, there are no character limits (since, after all, it’s really just a blog).

That, to be honest, is really all there is to it. I won’t bore you with the details of how to set up a WordPress blog–if you want to do it yourself, it’s pretty easy to just go to wordpress.com and install the theme in the theme browser. It’s also not hard to set one up in your own web hosting, though that takes a bit more technical knowledge. (If you’ve already got a domain and webhosting set up, you can even install it in a subdirectory.)

So go out there and make one! And of course, no need to tell me about it. Unless I’m your friend and all.