The Internet became personal and all I got was this stupid nametag. December 11, 2008
Posted by Rob de la Cretaz in Guest Contributors.Tags: Facebook, Friend Connect, Google, MySpaceID, privacy
trackback
Some day last week I woke up feeling instantly distressed, wondering, for no apparent reason, what exactly had happened to Google Friend Connect. Two days later that, I found an email in my inbox saying that I had been white-listed as a tester for the service, my mind was then blown in the advent of synchronicity, and I’m still sort of scratching my head. More importantly however, I got to thinking about what the big picture of this sort of technology would be, seeing as Facebook recently launched Facebook Connect, and MySpace is working on MySpaceID, which I can only hope will let tweens implement flashing gif backgrounds on any website they choose.
On the heels of Anthony’s recent post regarding privacy concerns in social media, the subsequent step of content aggregation beyond services like ping.fm, FriendFeed, and Power.com is to take something you already have and use and to embed it in everything else you do on-line. Instead of adding layers to your already triple-decked social media sandwich, why not brown-bag it and take your identity with you wherever you go?
What Google, Facebook, and Myspace aim to do with their new services is to nurture the idea of having your circle of friends with you during every step of your on-line life. Instead of logging on to each website separately, you would use one unified ID for everything (much like OpenID) and have all of your activity and sharing on these websites linked back to a main profile (not so much like OpenID). The best way I can think to describe this is to imagine that every website you went to had a FriendFeed widget built in, providing universal support for the entire internet. No more aggregation, no more linking your Flickr to your Tumblr via RSS so you can send things from your phone to have them posted on your Twitter. You send it to one profile, and all of your friends see it. Right? Right. Its still cloudy for me, too.
The utility of such a thing could be great and fantastic, but at the same time not only does it revoke a large percentage of your online privacy, but as a result of that, you are suddenly held directly accountable for everything you do on-line. While Google and Facebook are suddenly presented with daily records of your day-to-day life, and profit immensely from the potential ad-value of such information, you also can no longer enjoy the face-less anonymity that sitting behind a computer once gave us. Consider how many different websites you’ve signed up to, and that maybe you didn’t use the same username at each one. On one part of the internet, you could be that guy that everyone hates, starting flamewars left and right, meanwhile over at CuteOverload you’re having the time of your life discussing your deep heartfelt love for all things small and furry.
With a connection between these profiles (ie AngryDude203 and ILikePuppies15 are linked to google.com/SteveJ) suddenly your online life begins to feel a whole lot more like real life. In the same way that everyone in your home town sees your face and remembers that dumb skit you did in the 8th grade, escape from who you were in the past becomes that much harder.
Are we ready for these corporations to know everything we do? More importantly, are we ready for the people we know personally to know everything we do? Is this the future in social networking, and will the success of one company or another be the death-knell for independant websites? Share your comments, and in the meantime I’ll be under a few feet of concrete constructing my tin-helmet.
[...] the whole deal here. Subscribe to comments Comment | Trackback | [...]
“The utility of such a thing could be great and fantastic, but at the same time not only does it revoke a large percentage of your online privacy, but as a result of that, you are suddenly held directly accountable for everything you do on-line.”
A lot of people don’t realize it, but we’re already accountable for everything we do online.
If connecting all their accounts together helps create a better record of your online behavior, that may not be bad. Maybe people should hesitate to act like a jerk because their future mother-in-law may find it.
If fact, let’s make it more findable. Rather than manipulating behavior with ratings and arbitrary “karma” (Plurk) let’s just tag each others’ content. If someone’s always talking AT, instead of to, I want to tag it “douchebag.”
If a person has soemthing really bright to add to commentary and transforms the bland into fascinating, others readers can tag it “Jess.” If they always say something just to incite and create hysteria, if they constantly detour the topic, or if they constantly refute the importance of the topic or the forum, it could all be revealed in their associated tag cloud. How’s that for accountability and crowdsourcing?
Thus far people can detach themselves from the other end of their words, and boldly claim to be experts in the eyes of an audience they’ve never seen face to face. Well, let’s create a more accurate record and let society do what it does naturally. There were, long before anonymous accounts, voices who just didn’t care, or better yet, knew the price and were willing to pay. Maybe these voices once had fewer, but more poignant things to say.
Ok, tag this one “long comment.”
Final thought, Facebook knows more about you than you do. Besides all the information you’ve told it about yourself, it knows the private information of all your connections and all your unconnected neighbors, and about all the things they’re looking at on your profile.
I will have a 150 word comment on this later this afternoon I hope. For now, I have a new media show and tell, and a holiday “gift taking apocalypse” to coordinate. *sigh* Back later! Great post!
Reading about this stuff makes me feel old…
I remember when I first started using Facebook and I’d try to explain it to my mom, she would just keep asking “Why?” She just didn’t get it.
With all this Web 2.5 social networking aggregation stuff, I just keep asking “Why?” I just don’t get it. Why would anyone want everyone they know following their every movement? Why would they want people to be able to chat with them anytime, anywhere? I was the guy who never signed up for AIM because I was so sick of people messaging me on ICQ (remember that?) that I was starting to get scared to login.
Maybe this is how generational gaps start.
This video is fairly old, but extremely relevent: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wogtTQs8Kzw
I admit that I’m not comfortable with a single across-the-board account unifier. While I don’t feel that I have anything to hide, I don’t like the idea of every single one of my friends being able to track me to every single website to which I happen to belong.
I use Facebook primarily to keep in touch with friends from college and high school. Do I care if they happen to find me on Twitter? No, probably not. But do I want my Facebook and Twitter and Flickr accounts all tied in together, wrapped up in a neat little package that would give that girl I sat next to in math class that one time a much larger look into my life? Hell. No.
I can see where people who are more outgoing than I am and more technologically inclined might want to aggregate their accounts and put it all in one place. I can see where this might be useful for people whose business is the Internet. But I like controlling my content. I like knowing that only certain people have access to certain things. They’re called boundaries, and if Facebook doesn’t stop blurring the lines, I’m going to bail on them.
@Jess – Make that two 150 word comments.
@Rob – That’s exactly what I’m talking about. I like how they link FB to a CIA venture capital company. Whoa.
Also, think about the facial recognition tools available to the government. Once they have you tagged in a few places they can find you in the background of photos, placed and dated, that you aren’t tagged in.
@Marginal Designs – I’ll try to write a post dedicated to why this terrifying development is really necessary. What do we really get out of it, besides convenience, worth the considerate price.
@Amy – are you customizing your privacy settings on FB? They’re still limited, but ahead of other sites I think.
Remember, bonus points for closing a comment with “Discuss.”
@Anthony: I do use the privacy settings on Facebook, but not to the extent which I could, I suppose. They’re clunky, so I just don’t put anything on Facebook that I’m not comfortable sharing with every single one of my friends. Which is why my Twitter account and my website address will never be part of my Facebook profile.
I guess I would prefer if the aggregation could be used as a one way street: I don’t mind someone finding my website via Twitter, or my Facebook profile via my website, but I don’t want Facebook to be the epicenter of my social media stuff.
Maybe I’m just not the social media hipster that I should be.
It is irresponsible to assume that everything we do on the Internet can’t already be found. Or, everything we do on our cell phones, for that matter. In our homes? That remains to be seen.
OpenID, RSS, FriendFeed and others do make aggregation convenient, and put everything within our one-step reach. Isn’t that what we want? For everything to be easy? Right at our fingertips? We don’t want to LOOK for anything do we? We want it brought to us!
I am all for social media, aggregation, and the power of the Internet as a unifier and informer. However, in some ways I also like the (admittedly limited) anonymity it provides. Argue at will how anonymous that anonymity is, who I am here and who I am on gaming websites filled with nerds who feel I am deemed less worthy of their server space by virtue of the fact I am female are two completely different entities. Putting the two together isn’t necessarily hard, but effort would need to be made.
Being from a higher education background, I worry sometimes about how easy all of this aggregation makes things for us. Are we losing the desire to explore? And, in losing the desire, are we losing the ability? Corporate peeping aside, what is this doing to us psychologically? What is it doing to literacy as we know it? Is it encouraging laziness? Am I hypocritical for being such a proponent while, at the same time being such a critic? Could I ask any more questions in this comment?
(@Anthony – 258 words. @Rob – Great post!)
@Amy – I think you should consider that Facebook friends may find your Twitter and Blog address through mutual friends’ posts and status updates. Be warned.
@Jess – I like your point about literacy. I don’t necessarily accept it as fact, but I see strong enough possibility and maybe even likelihood. If people take a little discipline to their online presence they might actually become more literate. If I had started a blog before college I might not have failed that writing course.
What if we sacrifice a bit of overall sophistication in our literacy and replace it with some previously unimaginably sophisticated familiarity with the nature of information?
Once all the data gets woven together and findable, how does that transform people’s understanding that things in the world have intangible, complex, but real association with everything else? Knowing that everything we generate has a relationship to things unfamiliar to us personally could transform the way we humans think in general.
Ok, that’s a bit spacey, but there’s grand potential. It’s bigger than sharing vacation pictures and event invitations.
@Anthony – “Once all the data gets woven together and findable, how does that transform people’s understanding that things in the world have intangible, complex, but real association with everything else? Knowing that everything we generate has a relationship to things unfamiliar to us personally could transform the way we humans think in general.”
http://findability.org/ by Peter Morville = interesting read, perhaps pertinent to your thoughts. He also wrote a book, entitled Ambient Findability. A little dated by now, but perhaps you’d find it interesting. Your library may have it.
@Jess – Ambient Findability is actually in my bag, to be read. I’ve not given it time, yet, as I’ve been reading and writing really long comments on this blog.