I love the idea of owning my own data.
When you post a status update or write a tweet, you are doing so behind a wall. Your content is saved in that service’s own servers and they can do what they please with that data.
When you post to Facebook, Facebook owns that data. When you tweet, twitter owns it.
The idea of owning your data is to make sure that your content isn’t controlled by third party services. For example you could set up a website of your own and what you write on there is yours — as opposed to writing it on your Facebook wall. And you don’t have to worry about Facebook going bump.
Of course astute readers will be asking “surely the people who host my website will own my data”. The answer to this I am unsure about. But the fact that you are essentially renting the web space — much like rented accommodation — all the contents you put inside it should be owned and controlled by you. So I wanted to try and extend my content ownership to the third party services I use, namely Twitter.
With this in mind I have began posting some of my tweets as mini posts on my own site, then sharing them out to Twitter. I don’t know if this makes any sort of difference to my ownership over the data, but it does mean that no matter what Twitter does with my tweets, I will always have control over the originals on my own website and could even share them else where if I wanted.