internet privilege.

[I’m always uncomfortable writing about privilege as a concept, in large part because I’m a straight, middle class male, and therefore likely have a blind spot to some of the role privilege plays in my own life. But, I do feel that this needs to be said.]

I’ve been getting angry as I listen to the debate about anonymity, pseudonyms, and multiple identities online.

One of the things that derails tech-utopianism, is the face that it definitely seems like most of the platforms we’re using have been created by groups that are majority white, western, middle class male.

I’m pointing this out because it’s simple to see that most of the people weighing in and saying that people who want to use a fake name, or an obvious pseudonym, or multiple identities, have something to hide, or are being dishonest, or are being immature.

Identity isn’t as simple as you’re making it out to be.

Identity, online or off, is like a prism. The same beam of light can hit it, but if the angle changes, different colours are thrown off. A person is not the same with one peer group, as they are with another. They are not the same with their family, as they are with friends. They are not the same at work, as they are at home.

They are the same person, yes. But identity is fluid.

The thing is, when you (and I’m including myself in this) live in a society where the top line points of your identity (gender, sexuality, race, political affiliations / beliefs, etc) are not going to be persecuted, or when you are not in a situation where you could be ostracised from your family and friends due to revelations about your identity (I’m thinking specifically of sexual orientation or gender presentation, but this could also relate to politics and beliefs) it makes sense to think like Mark Zuckerberg, who has stated that anyone who wants more than one facebook identity is sketchy (paraphrasing).

But that’s because you, and most of the people making these arguments, have the (rather fantastic) privilege of not NEEDing to separate the different elements of their personas into different identities.

Not everyone has this benefit.

So, before I read another justification from Google or Facebook that tries to argue their stance is about anything beyond maintaining the purity of the data set they sell to advertisers, and before I read another pundit saying that the new reality of technology is that all actions will be aggregated and attached to your identity, I ask one very simple thing.

Consider people who don’t have all of the benefits you do, when you think about the impact of technologies on society, identity, and self-conception.

Because the people who benefit from things like multiple online identities, or pseudonyms, are rarely the people who are in a position to steer a globally popular platform, or criticize it to a massive audience.

Facebook is getting smarter.

And I’m not talking about Timeline, even though I will personally co-sign any feature launch that points directly to the genius of Feltron’s Annual Reports as inspiration.

Facebook has essentially declared battle on two fronts, now, and no one seems to realize it.

The number one reason I hear (anecdotally) for remaining a user of Facebook, even when the person in question actively hates the platform, is that ‘all of my friends are there’. This isn’t an idle reason, because this means that at least some of the following apply:

• facebook tracks your friend’s birthdays for you
• facebook is the primary invite system for social events
• people consider facebook a reliable method of contacting you
• a current or future significant other lists you as being in a relationship with them on facebook
• you have family members showing pictures of nieces and nephews and cousins on facebook
• you hear about important social news on facebook
• new coworkers want to find you on facebook
• you have dozens, if not hundreds, of photos of yourself on facebook, many of which you did not take

In short, facebook has its hooks into enough of your life, that leaving would have costs. Costs higher than the irritation of the platform.

The thing is, this method of retention has a limit. It’s the same tactic phone companies use - lock you in, and make it hard to leave. Facebook has been flirting with getting so irritating that people leave anyway, and so, in line with the hacker culture they claim, they’ve decided to innovate themselves out of it.

Timeline isn’t about making profiles better. It’s about making facebook your personal history. Something you won’t destroy because it means too much to you, rather than because it’s too much of a hassle.

Facebook is fighting on two fronts, now - you stay because you feel you have to, and you stay because you couldn’t bear to lose all the memories.

My justification for thinking this is simple; this was the first time a facebook announcement reminded me of an Apple announcement. The presentation focused on getting married, and the joy and hope and majesty that that entailed. The video (linked earlier) focused on building a finding love, growing up, building a family. Facebook is attempting to age with its core users, and picking the right chords to do so. In short, this was the same approach Apple used to market FaceTime.

This is why I think facebook is getting smarter. Timeline is the first launch from them in a long time that seems laser focused on the emotional centers and behaviours of the target audience. Facebook is coding nostalgia into the aftereffects of every one of your interactions, both on the site, and on the countless places where you’ll find a Like button, or a Connect authentication.

And it’ll be okay. Because facebook isn’t talking about showing your friends what you did today, anymore. They’re talking about showing your daughter what you did on her birthday, every year, all the way back until the day you met her mom.

A Tentative Google+ Use Case

Since joining Google+, I’ve learned the three things that seemingly everyone on there is learning:

1. The number one topic on Google+, is Google+
2. Despite the service’s focus on relevance and modeling actual human social grouping, there are still people who think of social connections as ‘points’, and aim for a high score
3. Very few people really know where it fits in, in their social media mix

But I think I’ve cracked it. Google+ is, in part, the solution to Facebook Connect authentication.

Facebook is trying to own identity online. This is what FB connect, and ‘Sign in with Facebook’ buttons are really doing - if your access to a million different things is tied to your Facebook identity, their data set becomes more valuable, and you chances of closing your account decrease to near zero.

The downside of this, is that suddenly Facebook is a public space. Even people like me, who responded to Google+’s circles concept with ‘I already do that with Facebook lists’, start decreasing thier use of Facebook as a place to share - to me, Facebook is turning into it’s namesake; it’s a static page that identifies me, and shares information about what I do elsewhere. Unlike a yearbook, we’re talking about what articles I read on CNN, not whether or not I was in Chess Club, but the idea is the same.

Google+ is far more focused on sharing content, and publishing content as well, to specific networks. Given my current use of Facebook, I don’t think there’s actually any overlap.

Facebook shares a more-or-less static profile, and online activity that you choose to tie to that identity.

Google+ offers a way of publishing content to select groups, but doesn’t really focus on sharing anything about you. Because (spoiler) Google doesn’t give data away. Google stores massive amounts of data, and then uses it behind the scenes to 1) sell things to you, and 2) sell you to things.

So what is Google+?

Google+ is a solution for the fact that status updates and link sharing on FB doesn’t actually make sense anymore, given what Facebook has become.

Google+ and thoughts on the future of social.

You don’t want to be a service, or a destination. You want to be a protocol.

Google+ has been incredibly valuable, mostly due to forcing us to reconsider the value of social networking, without the benefit of newness or an established personal / impersonal network of connections. And it has led me to a simple conclusion.

Facebook is a destination, and a platform. They tie a pile of services together, but it is something to be interacted with on their own terms, with little pellets ejected into the wider web, in the form of Like Buttons and Social Widgets. Facebook is a collection of activities that live offline and offsite, glued together by the social gravity of everyone you know being there, and easy of use due to integration into other sites.

Tumblr is an ecosystem. It is both a CMS and hosting service, but also a content discovery service. There are social elements, but Tumblr is best conceived of as the next evolution of what Livejournal was - a place to curate a private or public online presence, and stay abreast of a widening network of changes.

Twitter trends more towards being a protocol. (Yes, this is an oversimplification of the definition of protocol. I know.) Like RSS before it, the twitter experience is miles beyond the limitations of twitter.com, or even of the approved twitter functionality. Twitter is a great element that I’ve seen chopped and screwed into dozens of very different experiences. You could make the same argument for Foursquare - it is on the cusp of being more than a service, or an app. It’s becoming part of the architecture of the wider social web.

To be remixable is to achieve the digital equivalent of immortality.

Out of the three top line examples, the one I like most is Tumblr. The one I expect to survive the longest is Twitter. Facebook is in an odd middle space - the need it has for control, to be able to generate income and maintain its valuation, will cripple it from becoming part of the fabric of the evolving social web.

Tumblr is focused on remaining tumblr, and refining that use case and identity. Twitter is expanding outward, and getting integrated into new ideas and new communication concepts. Facebook is doing its damnedest to pull other experience online into itself; everything from blogs, to games, to unified messaging across all channels.

Google is trying to build a Facebook, I think, with the functional mask of Twitter. Google+ is mostly about tying activity everywhere to the same user profiles, and giving Google Search access to that data to refine its product.

You either want to be part of social behaviour online, or you want to make social behaviour online part of your product. I know where my bet goes as to what will be a success.

3 requests for the digital strategist in your life.

If the universe wanted to make me truly happy (in a professional sense) three things would happen within the next year:

1. Facebook would launch an ecommerce element within the FB platform, or integrate an existing ecomm service into FB.

2. Near Field Communication (NFC) would become a standard inclusion in every smartphone.

3. Someone would develop a battery-friendly solution for constant location awareness in mobile devices, rather than check-in based solutions.

If I were to pick the three biggest missing pieces when I think about the next steps in digital experience design (hat tip to @ianbarnett for getting me to think about it in this way) it would be the above.

It’s too complex and nebulous to demonstrate moving from facebook engagement to conversions. We can do more with that level of scale.

There are too many authentication barriers to digital engagement in the physical world. NFC and smartphones could shift this heavily.

Location-awareness is different than check-ins. True awareness can create true serendipity. Any check-in process becomes arduous if used too often.

Hopefully, this lets you know what I want for Xmas.

People have started saying “Like” in response to things.

Which is a better indication of the impact Facebook has on culture than the big, round, 500 Million user mark.

Facebook vs Google.

Facebook is betting everything on the marketing / advertising value of your projected persona, your own assessment of who you are, what you like, and how you classify yourself in front of your social circle.

Google is betting everything on your actions as an indicator of your intention and identity. Dissecting you via the totality of your emails, searches, YouTube views, RSS items, etc.

The question isn’t which is accurate in depicting your identity; both are. The question is, does your projected identity, or your demonstrated identity do a better job predicting consumption behaviour?

Answer that, and you know who owns the next decade online.

The Harry Potter Principle.

JK Rowling isn’t successful just because she tapped into a need for wonder that drives most children to explore literature.  Her most intelligent move was to create a property that matured with the audience.  The first Harry Potter book was, for all intents and purposes, a young adult novel.  The book was short, accessible in terms of language and subject matter, and filled with relatable moments for children of the appropriate age.

By the end of the series (I will admit I only read until book 5) each book was a tome of several hundred pages, deadling with adult concepts, and serious issues of morality and mortality.

Rowling let her product mature at a rate that kept her existing audience engaged.  If she’d written seven 150 page young adult novels, she would have needed to find a new audience, and new evangelists, by midway through the series.  Instead, a generation of kids grew up with Harry Potter as a series, and grew up with Harry Potter as a character.  When you’ve been interacting with the same product for seven or more years, you evangelize it constantly.  It becomes part of you.

Facebook has to take this into account, and it’s likely related to (according to eMarketer) some teens losing interest in Facebook.

I’m not going to indulge in ‘the sky is falling’ paranoia, because when it comes to numbers Facebook still has reach and engagement that the rest of the social networking space would kill for.  At the same time, it’s worth noting that technologies and social networks need to mature with the people involved.  

As such, facebook is faced with a complex and inenviable task - how do you mature with the generation of university students that launched the site into success, while still attracting an upcoming generation of teens and tweens whose older siblings, and at times parents, have already claimed the site as their own?

It’s the Harry Potter Principle: to succeed in maintaining a connection with an audience over time, you need to mature with them.  To continue growing that audience, you also need accessibility across multiple maturity levels (which can relate to age, or to knowledge of the material).