I think that Reginald is talking about social media platforms' APIs and other infrastructure that 3rd parties can connect to for whatever business they are in.
It is valid concern that, for example, Facebook may decide that providing their graph APIs is suddenly not in their interest and cut off the service.
Same thing happened with some Google APIs like the Buzz feed. I only briefly used the Buzz feed for a small customer task one time, and the termination of Buzz and the feed does not hurt me, but it could have.
I find the user experience using G+ to be good, but the APIs are not in anywhere near a form where I would build part of a business on them.
The situation is different with other infrastructure like AWS, Heroku, and AppEngine: I understand the long term business model of the providers and trust that these services will likely be available for a long time.
From reading the other posts, I see that I misinterpreted the article.
Saving blogging and other self promotion information is important. I hosted my own blogging solution in the past, but now I compromise: use Blogger, map it to a subdomain on my main web site, and make sure I back up Blogger's data so I could re-host it with some effort. So, I trade off some control for making life easier.
It is valid concern that, for example, Facebook may decide that providing their graph APIs is suddenly not in their interest and cut off the service.
Same thing happened with some Google APIs like the Buzz feed. I only briefly used the Buzz feed for a small customer task one time, and the termination of Buzz and the feed does not hurt me, but it could have.
I find the user experience using G+ to be good, but the APIs are not in anywhere near a form where I would build part of a business on them.
The situation is different with other infrastructure like AWS, Heroku, and AppEngine: I understand the long term business model of the providers and trust that these services will likely be available for a long time.