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 – 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.

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!)

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.

@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.”

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.

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.

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.