Interesting article over at The Inquistr yesterday, about why we shouldn’t trust social media startups.

Steve Hodson’s argument is that as users of social media services, too often we commit time and emotion to these sites only to be let down by poor execution by the founders or left in the lurch when a site enters the deadpool or is acquired by some larger market player.

Last night I went to a dinner with some of the leading people in the local social media space and I can say as a fact that many people creating social media services, in Sydney at least, do care about community.  More than that, though, they care about building value for users, not just exploiting their users so they can do the happy dance somewhere in the South of France when the acquisition dollars come in while those users have to start all over again somewhere else.

That having been said, sometimes (actually a lot of the time) startups fail. You can’t hate on entrepreneurs for that. And for many early adopters, the ones who get burnt most often by failed or changed services, there’s utility in being one of the first users of a site that offsets, to some degree, the likelihood of wasted time when that latest things falls over or disappears.

The deflated attitude of those, like Hodson, and perhaps you, who have been burnt time and time again, is a shame. It’s our responsibility to support sites we like so there’s a chance they get the traction necessary to keep them around for longer. Sure, from time to time, there will be abominations like the SixApart acquisition, and subsequent shut down, of Pownce, but surely they’re outliers that can’t drive your core behaviour.

Then again, perhaps the best solution to this problem is data portability. Sure losing a cool service sucks, but losing all the content you’ve generated sucks even more. At least data portability and similar solutions address part of that problem.

It’s an interesting article Hodson has written, and a real issue for local entrepreneurs. I wonder, as a small market with many startups that will die as they struggle to gain traction or that will be acquired for the technology/people rather than the total service, how do we plan to address it?