If you already participate in one or more ‘Planets’ then I’m preaching to the choir here. 

I recently joined Google+ and have been on Twitter and Facebook (And even Foursquare, Identi.ca and Gowalla) for quite a while and while listening to Arthur C. Clark’s ‘The City and the Stars‘, and the word Diaspar (Which sounds like Diaspora) came up, I paused and started brainstorming about Social Networks.

Turns out that my favorite form of Social Networks has existed for quite a while, it just wasn’t advertised properly, I guess. I’m talking about Planets.

See, Google+ had the “bright” idea of separating everyone in Circles. Turns out Planets do that already, you ask to join a Planet (Like Fedora’s Planet), and follow the feed. Voila, you’re sharing (Be it from Tumblr, WordPress, Livejournal or Mediawiki) with people who have your same interests.

The API used by these Planets? Basic XML in the format of RSS or Atom. If you can write an XML parser, you’re already halfway there, and most recent blogging engines feature this neat “Trackback” / “Pingback” feature which lets you know if your blogpost was mentioned elsewhere.

The beauty of Planets is that your same blogpost can be published to the ‘Circles’ you want, (Assuming you gave each planet a feed per tag or category, and tag a post in the category or feed you want), and you can also control the ‘Signal-to-Noise’ radio on Planets (though this varies on your RSS Reader, by muting certain people’s blogposts).

The fact that they’re usually blogs is a big plus, because people won’t post inane things like “I’m at so-and-so restaurant” (though Twitter and Identi.ca do provide RSS feeds that could easily be added), but posts can also use powerful plugins that allow both picture and video galleries and not just  massive walls of text. This also lets you ‘own’ your data, which doesn’t happen if you upload your pictures to Facebook, Google+, Picasa or TinyPic (among others),

Another big plus to Planets and Blogs is that comments take place inside your blog, and although notifications will vary from blog to blog, unlike on Google+ or Facebook, where commenting on someone’s post can often mean a huge stream of notifications, or on Twitter where you @reply to someone and often wonder if s/he read it or was lost in the firehose.

I actually care about my data and the things I write, which is why I’m strongly considering scaling back from these “Social Networks” and joining several Planets, leaving my Facebook and Twitter accounts as empty microphone-like shells.

What I actually end up doing is everyone’s guess, but what is definitely clear is that the signal-to-noise ratio on Google+ is too damned much, Twitter’s is too damned low and Facebook sorta hit a middle ground (Thanks to the ‘Hide all posts from ${SpammyAppOrPerson}’ option that probably no one ever heard of)

I know that the idea of having the ‘unwashed masses’ each have their own blog is unlikely to ever happen, but hey, I’m one of those that thought Twitter wouldn’t ever get anywhere, and look where it’s at right now.

As a final note, one that no one cares about, I wrote this using WordPress’ new Zen Mode, and I have to admit, I really enjoyed using it.