Techcrunch UK had a post on this the other day, and I thought the comments were so interesting I decided to blog about it here. I think this is the longest blog post I have ever done.
Sam Sethi wrote:
... details of The Internet Address Book (IAB), an identity search engine that scanned a host of popular social networks - MySpace, LinkedIn, Delicious, Skype etc. - to find a person’s various identities and/or profiles. Although this feature alone was potentially useful it was rather singular. At the time, it seemed like just another website where I had to invest a lot of time to register my social network identites, instant messaging IDs and web addresses but in return got very little value back.
Well since then the IAB have released a number of new features and functions which certainly make the site more useful and worth investing a little more time in. The new tools page provides tools like a search snippet which you can place on your personal blog, profile, email or website.
They have also developed a search plug-in for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox users (mozilla browsers) as well as a Widget for Apple Computer users. They have also added some more internet addresses to The Internet Address Book. e.g Profileheaven.co.uk, Ryze.com, Technorati, Picturetrail, Buzznet and many more. To see the entire list go to The Internet Address Book.
Another new tool that is interesting is the Wanted Snippet where you can list people you’re looking for by placing it on your blog or profile. They’ve also made it really easy to invite all your contacts from Live Messenger or Outlook at once!
Of course the problem for non-geeks is that you probably haven't heard of social networks, though Skype is not really one, and LinkedIn is more an American business network than a global social network. I had never heard of Profileheaven (don't bother, it's a feeble dating website) or Picturetrail or Buzznet.
Ever the early adopter, I decided to have a go, thinking it might just be the thing to find people on the internet, who I have lost touch with. But then I realised it was not so simple and wrote this comment on the Techcrunch UK site:
At first I thought this would be very useful but then I changed my mind. Why would I want to put all my different identities somewhere in the same place, apart from just to remind me? Isn’t the point of all the different identities so you can be someone else each time? So why would you want to connect them all together again? And why would I want to trust an unknown website with all this identity stuff? And the site is only useful when everyone has joined.
The response came from Imran Ali:
I disagree with your basic premise. IAB may not be to your tastes, but the broader notion of identity management is actually quite central to the future of computing.
Right now our digital identities are silo’d within various applications…for example, my social network in Flickr is pretty much the same as my del.icio.us and Last.FM social network - yet it’s a pain to maintain any kind of sync between these services. Of course, I dont’ want this social network to overlap with LinkedIn…and a LinkedIn recommendation doesnt mean the same as a Flickr testimonial, so there’s some complexity to address in such syncronisation…but this also addresses the autistifc nature of most social software.
Also, as web usage trends towards user-generated content, it becomes increasingly important to exert a reputation over the content you claim to have created. Admittedly, IAB has some way to go in this regard as it’s easily spoofed, but there’s a growing need for services that mediate IDs…if I claim tht a particular LinkedIn identity is mine, then I need to be able to prove this claim in order for that identity to be trusted.
IAB, Opinity and others are seeking to create a horizontal infrastructure that helps connect those silo’d applications where appropriate and returning control of identity to users, so they can determine the borders between facets of their real and digital persona.
This raised such interesting questions (perhaps not always intentionally) that I felt I wanted to host my own debate here (with myself if necessary).
1. I agree that identity protection is really important on the internet. This is already obvious from the concerns people have about theft of identity leading to financial loss. Banks spend a lot of time making sure it is really you getting at your money and despite that, fraud still occurs. But if this is so difficult for even banks, would you expect to rely on some upstart new web software to protect you? If not, how do we ever get started on this?
2. Ali is also talking about protection of intellectual property: claiming ownership of what you have created on the internet and protecting the reputation attached to that intellectual property. The phrase now inserted at the beginning of each book:
The right of ------------ to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
is sufficient to protect you (in the UK at least). It seems to me there are three parts to this assertion:
- identifying the work
- identifying the author
- identifying the owner of the intellectual property
Since almost nobody writes under their own name on the internet, pseudonyms (or avatars, or usernames or identities) are rife. Imran is saying that IAB can help with the task of proving that the author is the owner even if the author is a pseudonym. Again, I am not sure that some upstart new software offers much protection as far as proof in court, though it might provide some evidence that a pseudonym has been used by someone once. And IAB goes nowhere towards identifying the work, which is another problem altogether.
3. Ali suggests that IAB would be useful to "sync" between social networks and identify people you knew in another social network. The post by Sethi shows a widget displaying all the social networks he belongs to, presumably giving you details of all his different pseudonyms. But the reason people have all these different pseudonyms is because they want to have quite different personalities (identity is quite the wrong word here) in different social networks. It's one of the liberating things about the internet that you can be who you want to be, as well as one of the dangers that you are never quite sure everyone is what they say they are. My 16 year old daughter confessed that it was easy to pretend to be 21 in a chat room as she could imagine what it was like to be a student, but above 21 was more difficult because she had to invent a job which was harder for her.
OK, if you have too many usernames, it's maybe useful to have a bit of encrypted software to put them in a safer place than a list in a desk drawer. But why would anyone who has 5 different personalities with 5 different pseudonyms want to identify them as his, in a public place? There is often a real reason for having the different pseudonyms in the first place? I was very angry when, without asking me, Pandora identified my real name on my blog by placing a QuickMix radio station named from my email address in the Pandora widget on the blog. People get dooced, or outed or it might even be physically dangerous.
4. I think there is a genuine need for an internet directory so you can find people, but I'm not sure I would call it an Identity Directory. Within big social networks like yahoo, msn and google it isn't a problem to find someone. But as Sethi says, there are now so many social networks, instant messaging and web addresses that the overhead of entering them all somewhere else is just too much, even if you can remember them all. So a small startup website directory doesn't stand much of a chance. It would be much better if the big networks pooled the information they had. Of course, just like emails and postal mailing lists there should be an opt out, so that you have to give your permission for the information to be pooled. Then new social networks could add to the pool, and it would be easier for everybody to find people who wanted to be found. If that's what Ali means by the horizontal networks then I'm all for it ....
5. But then again I'm not. In Britain a big privacy issue is the attempt by the government to unify data on its citizens. Luckily it finds it hard enough to integrate the information in one sector, eg the Health Service, without wanting to integrate it with the police database or the Income Tax Service. I am not in favour of that sort of horizontal network at all. We can see what happens when China puts google under pressure to release information about what individuals are searching for. Maybe it will come eventually when all the checks and balances are in place (and then some more) but hopefully not in my lifetime.
6. I am constantly amazed how many people I know exist, and who I think must use the internet, who do not have what I call an internet "trace", for want of a better word. You can't find them on the big social networks and Google doesn't bring up a mention searching text material on the internet. I can't believe that people just are invisible on the internet. I really like the idea of the "wanted" widget. Hopefully someone who knows the person you list and tells them they are "wanted". But imagine the reaction of a technophobe person!
Yet it seems easier to find dead people through the internet than some people I assume are still alive. Making a regular search on google, we recently found a file on my father under his real name, (not the false one we knew him by) in an wartime Belgian archive, whose index must have only just been put on the internet. That was really exciting.
6. The phrase "autistic nature of most social networks" is interesting. A sort of oxymoron. But a search on Google proved it is a known phrase among geeks who discuss how their own personalities limit the horizons of the software they design. Do you rate your friends? It seems geeks do and assume everyone else does. One reference here by Danah Boyd suggests:
There are three ways to make technology work in the context of people:
1. Make a technology, market the hell out of it and demand that it fit into people's lives. When this fails logroll. In other words, bundle it with something that they need so that they're force to use it. Personally I think this is pretty disgusting, although I recognise this is the way most of our industry works.
2. Make a technology, throw it at the public and see what catches on. Follow the people who use it. Understand them. Understand what they are doing and how and why the technology fits into their lives. Evolve to better meet the needs and desires of the people who love the technology.
3. Understand a group of people and their needs and then develop a technology that comfortably embeds in the practices of those people.
She recommends the second and third alternatives, remarking that the third alternative is the one commonly used "in industry" (not clear what she means by that) and the second can be the method for social networks, if the technology stops being developed for a moment to observe how people are using it. The closing remark is "I vote we focus on the people and stop asking them to engage in autistic practices. Let's empower them to use their nuanced approaches to social life in a meaningful way." Amen to that.
7. She also points out that normal people don't really have multiple personalities on the web. They may have multiple pseudonyms but they are constrained by their imagination and the scripts they use in their offline personalities. Everyone knows the conflict you experience when you introduce your friends to your family, or your work friends to your college friends, but these are usually small differences in personality, not completely different identities as people claim to have on the internet.
8.The real core of the issue about connecting social networks both real and virtual is trust, which isn't built up by ratings or crude computer questionnaires. It isn't built up instantly either. People have to learn to trust banks with their money, especially in countries where banks failures have happened recently.
Although social networks enable you to find people with something in common, the real information or extended contact, on which you might base trust, tends to be only available on payment of increasingly large amounts of money. So what are you doing? Only meeting people willing and able to pay for information of the type you are interested in. That in itself excludes a range of people but does it produce trust?
Getting back to the original question which was: is there a need for an internet directory of identities, what is the answer? I think the answer is yes if it helps you to find other people, but no if it enables other people (and governments) to find you. Not very helpful to the autistic geeks who write the software!
