Thoughts, Code, Other

A very brief look into forces that are merging our previously distinct internet lives, and where it might take us.This article was originally written for 77agency

Sub-Identities

Being the savvy netizen you are, you have several accounts on the ‘net. Flickr, twitter, Facebook, Dopplr, Last.fm and endless other words that meant nothing to you 10 years ago, and continue to annoy those keen on correct spelling. You may use these accounts daily - engaging with others and contributing to a community, or treat them as a utility. But within each sphere there is data about you. Some you willingly provide through your profile information, the rest is populated based on the actions you perform.

Each of these accounts is nicely cordoned off from each other. Your colleagues at the bank may know that you tweet about financial stocks as “MrMoneyBrainz”, but they have no idea that you are the star contributor to Flickr’s kinkiest pictures group. That group in turn has no knowledge of your passion for early Abba on Last.fm (you oddball).

Your life on each of these separate planets form sub-identities, each expressing a part of your personality or interests in a narrow realm such as music or travel. We’re comfortable with this model as it’s exactly how we are used to managing our lives offline – our poker club friends don’t mix with our philosophy club friends. It’s simple to understand and there’s nothing to manage, except for a list of usernames and passwords longer than your arm (I recommend Roboform).

Life-Streaming

A few folks looked at this and decided we could do better. What if you wanted to show the world an integrated view of your sub-identities? Lifestream.fm, Friendfeed and Retaggr all provide for this. Enter all your usernames, and your activities are collated into a single stream of your life. Others can come to this place to get to know you, and connect where appropriate.

Interesting to watch here is the reaction to these ideas. Some leap at the opportunity to present a more holistic view on their life – they’re typically quite open to begin with, and happy to share more. The other contingent call it “Stalker 2.0″, and recoil in horror at the idea of becoming an open book. More and more are falling into the first camp however - the hundreds of thousands of accounts added to Facebook and twitter every day are testament to this. They notice that the sky hasn’t fallen, tell their friends, and the meme spreads.

Aggregating information like this is very useful, but still somewhat limited – I have to know both that such facilities exist, and that you are using one. The cordon between services is still somewhat in effect, and relegated to those in the know.

Collision

There are ways to overcome this. You can add your Flickr account to your Facebook stream, bringing the two worlds together for your Facebook friends. The latest Tweetdeck (a popular twitter client) integrates well with video blog 12 seconds, and ping.fm can push your status updates to almost any service you like, so your mood at any moment is known in all the communities you belong to. Your latest earworm you are listening to (again) in blip.fm can be pushed to twitter automatically. The list goes on, forming a massive matrix of connections between services.

Any modern web app knows that integrating with existing services is a lot easier than trying to operate as an island, and can make their service instantly more useful. It makes sense to give their users a chance to link their accounts in some way.

Every time someone does so, their sub-identities become less distinct, and we become more comfortable with the idea.

Laziness makes walls fall

So clearly the trend is for the walls between your sub-identities to come down. It’s still voluntary of course - you have to opt-in to connect your sub-identities, and you have to know that such facilities exist. But we’ve not accounted for a key catalyst in human progress yet: laziness (or to be more generously, “convenience”).

I simply don’t have time to upload photos to both Flickr and Facebook. And my common friends on both systems don’t have time to be notified twice about the same new photos from me. I don’t want to add the same (real) person on 10 different platforms as a “friend” - once should be enough. I don’t want to have to log into 10 different systems in addition to email to answer messages. My hunch is that most feel the same.

Wouldn’t it be great if the cornucopia of platforms could continue to proliferate, but differentiate purely on their own innovations? Trying to convince users they need another messaging system, another list of distinct “friends”, and yet another username seems like an unnecessary hurdle. Web developers would prefer to focus on creating interesting functionality.

Integration

Enter Facebook Connect. A system for both single-signon (no more usernames and passwords for every service) and a mechanism to push your activities to a central place (Facebook). This is really important. In one fell swoop it touches our laziness nerve, and brings a form of integrated life-streaming to the non-geeky masses. Facebook’s user momentum is currently so significant that achieving critical mass (becoming the de-facto login on any site) is not unthinkable. Instead of holding a smorgasbord of accounts, you hold one, and use it everywhere to interact.

Monopoly 2.0?

A closed, proprietary system like this is the antithesis of what the internet was founded on. Your online life becomes controlled by one entity, which doesn’t even bother with a warm fuzzy motto like “don’t be evil”. It’s therefore conceivable, and preferable, that we end up with two or three similar systems of this nature. They can compete on minor points, but must be largely interoperable. Anything is game for use as competitive advantage, but history shows us that interoperability is usually unavoidable eventually. Web developers for one will scream bloody murder at having to facilitate logging in via too many disparate systems.

One Identity to rule them all

Whether the mechanics of all this revolve around a monopoly, oligopoly, or a completely federated system, the norm will become to forgo distinct sub-identities. (For privacy reasons, you might retain one or two sub-identities that are unconnected to your main profile, but they will be the exception). What effects might this have?

• Your social graph is more tightly integrated with your communities. You may love or hate this. You’ll like the serendipitous crossing of lives (a school-friend you added on Bebo years ago notices your Dopplr update about being in town, you meet for coffee and decide to form a company), and greater opportunities (an associate didn’t realize you were such an expert in goose mating rituals until you tweeted about it, and recommends you for that job at the zoo you’ve always wanted). You might dislike potential mates knowing about your obsession with stamps.
• You’ll appreciate the integrated view of the people in your life, from business associates to family, all managed through the same portal. The software we use to view this integrated life will have to raise its game significantly. With all this data, we’ll need much better ways of categorizing people (some of it done automatically), more intelligent news feeds, and vastly improved methods of alerting us appropriately about activities.
• Other “utility” upsides become easier to implement. For example, events and contact details are exchanged, synced, and kept up to date with no effort. Later this allows computers to be told “schedule a beer with Dave sometime next week when we both have time”, and it can handle the whole process, even though “Dave” is an entity on a completely different platform.
• A unified identity, against your real name, alters the atmosphere on the internet. Again, this is spurred on by convenience. If a blog implements Facebook Connect, you can sign up and comment on an article in seconds. If not, you might have to do the whole “pick a username and password and check it’s all ok and then confirm your email address” song and dance. A hassle, with the only upside being the option for anonymity, by using fake credentials. Most will opt for the former, and we go from defaulting to potential anonymity, to defaulting to accountability. Almost accidentally, we might get more engagement and contributions to online communities (currently less than 10% contribute). Less lurking, and less trolling - a great thing.
• The subtly different faces you maintain for different groups of people in your life will erode. Everyone from your place of worship will know that you listen to hardcore death metal. Despite being a powerful business-person, your childish penchant for lolcats will be common knowledge. Your grandmother could be revered for her extensive knowledge about dark dubstep. Our stereotypes may be forced to bend or break to accommodate all this.

But what about privacy?

This is where things get interesting. With all our interests and activities collated, we’ll be faced with new challenges on how to decide who gets to see all this data. We’ll be rightly concerned with stalking, ID theft, and having information used against you later - Google never forgets. We’ll face a choice:

• Demand micro control privacy knobs on everything. We set exactly what is seen, by whom, when, at what level of detail. Technically somewhat feasible, but wildly impractical. Having complex rule systems (or choosing privacy settings on every action) is too much hassle and too complex for everyday use. The use of groups may prove too inflexible.
• Evolve our ideas about what privacy really means. This is a complex issue, but a quick comment is justified. Our society seems to tolerate a gap between what is acceptable to portray in public, and what is acceptable behind closed doors (unless you’re a celebrity). Perhaps we’ll find that this gap actually doesn’t make sense, and some of our basic ideas about what privacy is, are founded on a gap that does us no good to begin with. A meritocracy, less obsessed with personal preferences, might flourish. See David Brin’s work for ideas about a more transparent society.
• Drop off the grid entirely. “Facebook suicide” already happens, and faced with a new world of confusing choices, some will pick the blue pill in desperation. If current peer pressure is anything to go by, this option will become increasingly difficult. Once we start to organize our diaries automatically, it will amount to becoming a hermit.

A rough hybrid of the first two options – if you’re not my “friend” you see basic info, otherwise you see everything – seems likely to be taken up by most. Remember that by the time today’s toddlers start using online social systems, the sub-identity concept may seem genuinely archaic, anti-social, or even just unknown.

To boldly go

We’ll have to wait and see exactly how this pans out, but I’m optimistic. I see some interesting positive social effects potentially emerging (that might spill over to the offline realm) and great personal benefits and opportunities. New challenges, and a requirement to adapt to the unfamiliar also await, and will test us in unforeseen ways.

I’ve only lightly touched on some very big issues here, but the identity genie is out of the bottle. It’s up to us to adapt.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 7th, 2009 at 10:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.