Andy Brett

Tonido is a company after my own heart. They address many of the concerns that I have about the way that people publish and share their own content online. The short version of that post is that you should be able to publish content in one place, that you control, and easily choose how to share each individual item with your friends (as well as which friends to share it with).

Tonido takes a big step in that direction. By providing a low-cost, energy- sipping, user-friendly home server, they make it easy for people to take their data out of the cloud but not lose any of the associated benefits.

The other development in this arena that has me excited is Facebook’s decision to further open their API and make it even easier for third party sites to seamlessly integrate a user’s network into his experience on the site.

In other words, it allows me to do something like host my own photos on my own server (or Tonido if I so choose), and have any social activity (new albums, comments, tags) be posted back to Facebook just as if it had happened there in the first place. This is a huge shift (though one that Facebook has slowly been inching towards for a while now).

But we’re not there yet, which is the most exciting part. I could easily see Tonido, as much as I like them, getting overtaken by a fast follower who offers a more appealing combination of applications or even more seamless integration with social networks.

Maybe I’ll even give it a shot – after all, I have 10 spare hours a week.