Apps for Your Data

At the combined iOS/Android meetup last night, Demian Seiler did a short presentation on PressGram. It is an app that purports to replace instagram, and does so by posting your pictures to your own Wordpress blog. But here's the interesting part, the app augments that post with its own social network and associated meta-data.

This is brilliant! All of the actual content, the valuable stuff, is entirely yours. Even if PressGram goes out of business, your pictures remain on your blog, yours to do whatever you wish with. But the meta-data and social network, which is a really hard problem to solve in a distributed fashion, is centralized in the pressgram service. I love this idea, especially considering all the recent press that services such as intagram and medium have gotten recently about their terms of use.

I would really love to see more apps be tools to let you author your own content, while still maintaining ownership and control over how it is published.