Why would people want their social network identities tied together?
marc one question, why would people want their social network identities tied together? i mean - your average joe kind of wants his linkedin and myspace and plenty offish identities separate if you ask me.
Good question and I’d like to spend some time making it VERY clear under what circumstances I see this being relevant and where this is just a geeky, esoteric notion.
First of all - here are some assumptions being made:
1. Early adopter nerds do things that most normal people would never even think of, or do something years ahead of when the mainstream populace does - eventually. We’ve seen that with Flickr, blogging and social networking recently - but this has always been the case. Believe it or not there were nerds creating animated presentations on B&W Macintoshes - even before the Mac was available in color!
2. In the case of digital identities - we have a VERY special situation evolving - where we need to educate people and make them realize that they CAN control access and movement of their own profile data and that ALL software has a digital identity account that holds your basic ‘digital identity’ in it and that you can use this profile data - elsewhere Folks have to realize that it IS possible to be able to aggregate, synchronize and manage ALL your digital identities - from one place. This process is happening as we speak - but it’ll take many years to even get remotely close to educating the world. BTW it took 15 years for folks to realize that animated ads could be made interactive and pervasive.
3. In this evolving eco-system - everyone and their mother wishes to be THE provider of the uber-profile account. It’s the modern day form of lock-in. So we’re seeing MySpace, YouTube, Facebook flexing their muscles (each in ther own way) utilizing various techniques to keep their customers locked into their platforms. We also see old school players lile Yahoo and AOL realizing that the new lock-in is no lock-in - so things are getting interesting - for sure!
4. The notion of an “ID Broker” has evolved, where trusted third party ID service providers will offer end users the ability to get their own independent, not locked into anyone OpenID. But in fact those ID brokers are just another form of lock-in - as your OpenID has a domain attached to it - which is the ID broker’s domain. So whoever the ID broker is - is the lock-in. BTW that’s what Feedburner is doing to your blog feed - turning it into THEIR blog feed.
OK - so that’s the background to the answer I’m about to suggest to Dr. Chadblog’s question.
So when does an average Joe wish to connect their identities together? Well for some - maybe never. But at least they WILL be able to do it! As opposed to NOT being able to do it - at all.
The ramifications of having this ability need to ripple throughout the indutry. If MySpace is not willing to let users export their data or allow them to update and change their internal data - remotely - then we need to start hacking and scraping MySpace.
But I’ll spell some simple yarns which should make my feelings clear to Dr. Chadblog and precisely answer his question.
1. I have photos all over the place. On my blog, my Flickr (or Fotolog or Buzznet) account, on several different social networks and I’m in photos all over place - starting with Google and Yahoo and working on down from there. I also have photos on my cell phone and my digital camera. So I want to aggregate all these photos together, perhaps choose the best ones of my kids or vacations - and pile them into widgets, sldieshows or some new place I’d like to setup just for my family. In this scenario I’d want to connect to each of these accounts, but still continue to use all my accounts the way I do already. Our ideas are not to change people’s behavior paterms but in fact connect together disparate accounts - via their digital ID. This is the essense of what I call “digital lifestyle aggregation”. Products like dabble, plum, spokeo, klostu, meefeedia all attempt to do this in one way or other.
2. Now lets say I got all these college buddies - on all these different social networks - and I’d like to create a Widget of all of them - together. Sure I can build a widget manually - or use the new Widget feature in conjunction with External accounts in the new version of PeopleAggregator to do this - but if I could ‘tie’ my IDs together - I’d have this data aggregated - all the time.
3. Then there’s the business scenario of aggregating my LinkedIn profile with all these other places that I store my ‘business self’. When reaching out to people, when trying to sell or market your product or services - when trying to hire people - it would be far more advantageous if you could connect together your various digital IDs into some sort of comprehensive people connection engine. This is exactly what Craigslist avoids by NOT giving you any sort of account on Craigslist. That lack of structure keeps you locked into Craigslist’s unstructure.
4. But none of these scenarios answer the direct question about my social network IDs. So I’ve got a few friends on MySpace, have been an original member of Tribe since its outset and have other friends sprinkled on Facebook, Ecademy, Xing and Multiply. I also have old accounts on Orkut, Ryze and Friendster. I’ve also found that if I want to contact some folks - accessing them through Flcikr or LiveJournal is actually the best way to reach them. So if there’s one thing I know - its that I want to have a way of accessing all these folks in some sort of ‘normalized’ manner (master profile account) and still keep my digital lives going on these systems, wihout having to give up anything. This is exactly the feature we’re working on now for the next version of PeopleAggregator. I run into people all the time who ask me for this feature, after speeches I give, on the street or via email or comments left behind. If that many people ask for the freature - we’ll give it to them.
So dude - people want to connect their social nework identities together - because the nature of social networking is that you’re a member of multiple networks - but yet you’re still the same person. You may have different personas and REASONS for keeping your identities separate - but if you DO want to do that, you should be able to.
Today it seems like some esoteric nerdy desire, but once the end-user benefits are obvious and we’ve moved beyond early adopter syndrome - well then we won’t be asking “why” - but “what took yah so long?”
March 24th, 2007 at 11:59 pm
[…] View original post here: Marc Canter […]
March 27th, 2007 at 10:20 pm
Hm….I agree that this will evolve at some point. The way I would term it is once people get serious about X feature - blogs, photos, etc. they want to migrate off of more generic platforms and go to more purpose-specific platforms. However your scenarios seem to have two issues, one of identity management annd data sharing.
Regarding data sharing it seems to me that what yoou are referring to is some kind of basic data-publishing scenario where I publish my blogs / photos / listings / whatever once then they get pushed out at my leisure to various other platforms. But….this is directly in opposition to the business plans of all the sn companies. I’m pretty sure newscorp isn’t too eager to help their users migrate to wordpress for blogging and flickr for photos. Also, how big is the user annoyance here? As long as my photos are on flickr I can link to them from anywhere manually today. I guess I’m not sure this is something that can be forced in terms of evangelism to the SN companies (thats kind of like selling thanksgiving to turkeys). Probably whats needed here are some kind of use cases that will make users demand data-publishing across SNs. And note, a lot of the stuff you are talking about here is doable today using widgets. For instance you can push your flickr photos over to any webpage using a widget. Maybe this doesnt fix long-term storage but I’d argue people will gravitate towards service providers who are stable and won’t go out of business anyway. Maybe S3 can have a consumer offering.
On identity however i’m totally unconvinced. Sure IN THEORY if I could have one username and password to log into all of my different sites that would be much neater than how it works now. But from a user standpoint, again, I think people would be very nervous if their account on linkedin was even tangentially linked to their myspace account. Remembering multiple name/passwords seems to me to be here for awhile longer.
We’re currently in a land-grab. My guess is that your vision will come to pass, but only after the boom-bust cycle takes effect and we get to a point where user annoyce is greater than the energy put into creating monetizable walled gardens by the companies. Whicch will only happen when the ad bubble bursts again and the market for startups stops valuing captive users so highly. I mean, end of day its a social problem not a technical problem, its solvable today without a doubt. But like your earlier effort (FOAF) I am a little doubtful that there is sufficient force pushing in the data-sharing and identity-sharing direction as opposed to force pushing to capture users in walled gardens. In a way it reminds me of what I used to hear from arrogant enterprise software companies about “our customers”. The same 500 customers, every arrogant enterprise customer thought they owned.
March 27th, 2007 at 10:55 pm
[…] This comment was left on the post where I responded to Chadblog’s question: “why would people want their social network identities tied together?” […]