Ev BogueOver the weekend (April 2nd-3rd 2011) Letter.ly lost their .ly domain name to the war in Libya. This morning they relaunched the service as Letterly.net -- and are hoping to get their old domain back as soon as things cool down in Libya.
Subscribers to my Letter should be unaffected. I'll be sending out a letter later -- let me know if anything is amiss and I'll inform the Letter.ly team of the troubles.
Every time a service fails on the Net, it gives you an opportunity to look at insecurity and resilience of a system overall. In any ecosystem, individual systems fail continuously, but the larger structure remains intact and growing.
There's the danger of relying too much on any one piece in the system.
Letter.ly is one key in the overall architecture of my business. Income flows into my business in various ways, Letter.ly was just one of them.
The worry initially was that Letter.ly would never come up again. If all of my income was coming from that one service, I would have had to start from scratch. Thankfully, as my business grows, so do the ways in which income flows. I'd still have significant e-book revenue coming in independently.
This is why we diversify.
Ultimately, the best insurance you can ever have while working online is in the minds of your fellow human beings. The human cache doesn't fail.
If you're creating powerful work, your peers will find you, despite holes in the Net.
I've been thinking a lot lately about fragility.
Human nature is to believe that we're going to live forever, but the reality is that death could take us at any time. All you have to do is forget to look both ways and you're liable to get squished in most cities by one of those four-wheeled metal/plastic creatures that everyone propels themselves around in. I could spend all day thinking of great ways for me to die.
Services on the Internet operate the same way.
We take Facebook and Twitter for granted, but both of these massive services only pretend to have a business plan. At any moment either one could cease to exist. They're both private companies, so no one knows how much revenue they're actually bringing in. I suspect one of these services has long past its expiration date -- the other is incredibly useful for now, but it also could go under.
Smaller services like Letter.ly aren't missed for a weekend in the grand schemes of things, but if Facebook folded the Internet would suddenly find itself with 600 million refugees -- people who never learned how to build their own homes on the Net. It's hard to comprehend the implications of this. And what of the people who painstakingly built their businesses while relying on a single social media service?
My instinct is that social crash is closer than we believe.
It's becoming apparent to me that we all need to own our homes on the web. I own this domain, I installed WordPress myself, I coded the CSS for the template. This gives me some layer of security that many people existing on remote hosted services cannot feel.
Do you own your home on the web or does someone else call the shots there?
Sometimes, it's hard to determine whether or not a service has actually died.
Many of us are coming on decade-long relationships with services that don't have business models. How can we be sure that they'll be around forever?
The truth is that we can't know. There is no security.
Even if a service hasn't died, or will not die outright (Friendster is still kicking), there's always the risk that your relationship with the service will becoming more drama than it's worth. Do you really want to click 'no' on another Farmville invite?
We want assurances with the Internet, but there are none. Everything is impermanent. The 'next thing' is just around the corner -- and funding for a project could dry up at any time.
There is however, another option: diversity. Ecosystems thrive when you embrace multiple platforms. When one fails, another will take its place.
As I wrote on the page How I Work from Anywhere, the Letter.ly is just one income stream of many.
Losing Letter.ly simply hurt the most (albeit temporarily), because it was the one I was actively investing the most time and effort in -- and feel the most return from creatively. The people subscribed to my Letter.ly are the people I'm doing the deepest work with.
When we're cut off from a service we rely on, unplugged, it hurts.
But sometimes it's better for a relationship with a service to end abruptly, so you can invest your time in developing new connections. Sometimes being brave enough to make the disconnection now will make space for less suffering in the future.
When a service dies, and you feel pain, it's a good chance to ask yourself: why were you dependent on this one service to begin with?
Every service drains your energy. The question is, are you putting in more energy than you're getting back?
Over the weekend, I decided that I have a new goal in life.
Sometimes it's good to do a little dreaming. This way, you can imagine where you'll be in six months, a year, ten years down the road.
I want to take a forever sabbatical.
I want to learn to use the Internet to turn off the Internet.
In August of 2010, I took a month off the Internet, a digital sabbatical. When I returned my business was more profitable than when I left. I believe that taking a forever sabbatical is a realistic goal, however unrealistic it sounds.
I wrote in Augmented Humanity that technology is becoming powerful enough that we can turn off the screens. I've slowly been watching as I download more of myself onto the fullbody Internet -- the one where all of the senses work -- reality.
I want to turn off the screens, head into the mountains, and never be heard from again.
The service failure at Letter.ly illustrates to me that this reality will take work.
In May I'm heading to New York, Chicago, back to Boulder, then internationally to Melbourne Australia where I'm speaking at This is Mindful. After Melbourne? Who knows.
The Internet wants something from us still. I want to figure out what it wants, give it what it needs, and then turn it off.
Every day, I check services such as email and Twitter a little less. It's not hard for me to imagine a world where I check in once a week. Once a week moves to once a month. Once a month moves to once a year.
I'm hoping to record my progress as I figure out how to use the Net to turn off the Net.