We’re at a time like never before in human history. Where entire families can keep up with your every move (via Twitter), see what you had for Breakfast (via Flicker), know who all your friends are (via Facebook, MySpace, etc), and all the people you’ve networked with professionally (via LinkedIn, etc).

This ability is AMAZING! It’s something that as I child I could have only dreamed of. Imagine, you’re 12 and your best friend moves to a town across the country. When I was young, you wrote a couple of letters, and eventually you forgot about those friends (more or less). But now a friend moves away, and yet I can still feel like I’m a part of their day to day life. This completely changes the social dynamic of our world… but there are a few downsides.

First, how are we supposed to keep track of all of these portals? Drew Barrymore says it best in an upcoming film:

“I had this guy leave me a voice mail at work, and so I called him at home, and he emailed me to my BlackBerry, and so I texted to his cell, and now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies. It’s exhausting.”

It’s true, there’s too much to check, too many places to try and keep up with friends, check messages, and status’, and microfeeds… so what’s the answer? Aggrigators? A “Dashboard” as proposed by Marc Canter, or perhaps an additional hour (or day) to the week? (we could call it NetDay, placed somewhere between Tuesday and Friday).

Hopefully something will eventually ease the anxiety and exhaustion of just trying to “keep up”.

But perhaps more troubling than all of the places to check… is what happens when one of your portals suddenly DISAPPEARS, closes their doors (along with it, your content). For those who haven’t read the EULA (End User License Agreement) to most Social Networks, you’ll find that once you release your content (photos, videos, documents, etc) THEY own it. If they disappear, along goes your online identity!

There are some seeing this as a problem and proposing a solution.  But at the end of the day the only true backup is to OWN YOUR OWN CONTENT!

Don’t back up your entire collection of photos on facebook and delete them from your camera. Don’t assume your YouTube channel is a safehouse for the videos of your children. Own it!

This is true for individuals, companies and artists on proprietary platforms (even custom designed content management systems), if you don’t have hosting, and you don’t own the url, it’s not NECESSARILY yours.

note:  Even if you own the content on a 3rd party CMS, you may not ever be able to make a seamless transfer to another platform.

Bottom line Individuals, Companies, and Artists should OWN THEIR CONTENT.. OWN THEIR SITE… AND CREATE THEIR OWN PORTAL… it’s the only safeguard against losing it all when the inevitable attrition of these sites begins.

Companies / Artists, I’ve got a WONDERFUL solution for you.  At the end of it all the platform, content, hosting, site… all of it is yours!

Individuals, if you’re willing to spend $30 a year, you can devise your own solution.

Don’t leave it all up to the social networks.  Own it.  Don’t lose it!