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The Social Media types need some perspective. Now is a good time.

Over the past fortnight, the social media echo chamber has found three reasons to be up in arms about: Friendfeed’s acquisition by Facebook, the folding of URL shortener tr.im, and the Denial of Service attack on Twitter. Personalities have been apparently outraged, insulted, dismayed and betrayed. Yeah, betrayed by a startup. Imagine.

Most of the brouhaha seems to be about the lack of data ownership. More specifically, about the permanence of the conversations that these social media mavens were increasingly having over the web (and not so much about their online photos and documents). They lament that should a startup like Friendfeed fold, all the stuff they’ve shared, all their comments and likes, all their conversations with fellow Friendfeeders, indeed their entire network would disappear too.

And suggestions for action have included going back to the Age of the Blog (that is, centralizing all your content on a self-hosted server and hosting conversations there) and building distributed social applications (think Google Talk as opposed to Twitter.com and Friendfeed.com).

Of course, the vast majority – and I mean the overwhelming majority – of Internet users didn’t even know about these upheavals. (All right, the Twitter episode might have made its way onto the evening news, with parents turning to their kids with “What’s Twitter again?” and exasperated teenagers beginning, with a deep breath, “For the last time, it’s like this…”) Anyway, this majority doesn’t seem bothered by the prospect of not being able to preserve their conversations and shared stuff for posterity. They’re OK as long as they have email. And Yahoo! Messenger. And now Facebook. Some of them might have a Twitter account. Or one on Google Reader, or even Friendfeed. But if any or all of these new services were to disappear – poof – tomorrow, taking all their data along, Life As We Know It wouldn’t change.

Then why is the social media echo chamber in such a tizzy? What’s with all the frothing and “we can’t trust anyone anymore”ing?

Because for the average Web user, these social applications are distractions, entertainment or casual education. For social media mavens they are quasi-business. They are places where they build their brand, their standing, their reputation, where they gain their legitimacy.

They are influencers of opinion, and Twitter and Friendfeed are their pulpit. Their network is their audience. URL shorteners are how they direct their followers to what they deem noteworthy. No wonder they run contests to see who reaches the most followers and who makes it to the Suggested Users list. And that they get their favorite handles on every shiny new service.

For them, such applications must provide industrial-grade integrity, availability (and data portability). The founders of most social media applications, though, are just not at that stage yet. They’re merely testing new ways of sharing information and connecting users and figuring out how to define their newly popular application. Building a stable, always-on, scalable service that early on is a secondary priority. But social media mavens, by virtue of being early adopters, begin expecting this secondary priority too quickly for the founders to keep up.

Sometimes the startup infrastructure may be too weak to withstand even legitimate peak load. Sometimes the service might fold. Sometimes founders may decide to abandon their startup to take on similar challenges at a larger company.

And for almost everyone out there that’s OK. Because for them it’s not life-and-death. Social media mavens – the so-called A-listers – need to get some perspective. Fast.