livefyre Archives | Ian M Rountree

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Robert Scoble posted an interesting discussion topic on his Facebook wall, asking the deceptively simple question: Who will win the Identity war in 2010?

The question was asked with specificity towards tech platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, Google and so on, but it’s an important question to ask of ourselves: to whom are we giving the leverage of our primary identification on the web?

Like a lot of others who are best suited to interface, I’m an adaptable person. This is both a great help in my work, and a hindrance with my friends for one simple reason; when I spend time with you, I’m going to start to sound like you. If I spend an evening watching QI, I have a flare-up of British in my speech. If I spend too much time reading Justin Kownacki, I get ornery. Too much Seth Godin and I fall afoul of sweeping inspirational pessimism. I’ve been accused of having a weak identity, but I don’t think that’s it, primarily because I’m not alone in this behaviour; I just happen to display it as a very visible means of communication. I’m in the habit not only of speaking your language, but speaking your accent as well.

Identity is a touchy subject for a lot of people. We like to be ourselves, but easily fall afoul of pop culture epidemics. Every teenager falls into a category during high school – those who try not to get branded as “outsiders” by their peers, which makes demarcation an impossible process to avoid; it only goes away when everyone stops participating, and it’s not human nature to remain intentionally ambiguous. Social networks make this even more difficult to avoid – Twitter has lists, Facebook has the friend system, as do so many other networks. It’s not a bad thing, but as with so much else, awareness is the key to safe navigation.

The idea of identity, of finding peers to connect with, is so easy to reconcile with our daily lives that technology has adapted it as a mode of operation – we can’t ignore this. Peer to Peer filesharing. Friends lists. Contact lists, address books, RSS feeds, folders, libraries, right down to the DLLs that run your computer programs. Grouping is everywhere. And because it’s everywhere, it’s possible to manipulate.

I recently read an article on Brad J Ward’s blog from last year about “FacebookGate” where a group had severely infiltrated student-run graduation groups for various schools – for who knows what purpose. Perhaps data mining. Maybe stalking. It doesn’t matter. What matters is this event as a demonstration of the very demarcation we use to identify ourselves being used for purposes we did not choose when we claimed the label in the first place.

It gets worse: Over the last month I’ve seen both Chris Brogan and Amber Naslund suffer outright plagiarism. Brogan’s world saw a hack marketing an eBook made out of a collection of Chris’ blog posts. Naslund had a blog post ripped right from her site and posted, no claim of attribution whatsoever, on another site. This goes beyond casual emulation for the sake of communication; this is outright personality theft.

So how does this apply to technology as a communicative and cultural force? In practice. I make a habit of signing up for every social networking site I can lay my greedy hands on, whether I’m aiming to use it or not. I’ve been trying to snap up my own names as a username for the last three months as well, for branding purposes, it just makes sense. Now, think about that for a second. Think about what I just said.

Branding purposes.

Sounds funny, doesn’t it? We talk about personal branding all the time, but it’s always as an external force, information we’re carefully aligning outside ourselves on networks, website after website, trying to make a name for ourselves. We get annoyed if our names are already taken, but how do we fight back? Not by making a mass acceptance of the fact that our personal brands are facets of our identity – that would be silly, applying a business term to ourselves – but rather by setting up “Verified Accounts” and other measures to make sure the people represented by certain usernames really are themselves. It’s a good thing, but it’s still external.

Scoble’s question about who will win the identity war this year – and it will be this year, it has to be, or it will never come – is a big one. I answered by asserting that it won’t be the creation of utility that wins. If we’re looking for utility we already have a mesh of social networks for that. Facebook for friend gathering Twitter for grapeshot conversation, LiveFyre for in-depth enquiry. FourSquare and Gowalla for relational location. We build our online identities out of these things, among many others (personally branded websites, I’m aware, are a big deal as well. I’ve got mine, did you get yours?) and often forget that the idea of identity is more about accessibility than it is about utility. We use these networks to get our words out to others, to track interest in what we say based on how, when, and how loud we say it.

Whatever wins the identity war will provide the greatest power of accessibility and cross-feeding to the largest number of people with the least amount of hassle. Google’s profiles are a great start, but it’s not quite enough. If I know El Goog half as well as I hallucinate that I do, they’ll improve it; I can see the potential there for the perfect outward-facing home base meshed with the ultimate inward-facing dashboard. I wonder if they do, too.

Maybe it won’t be Google. Maybe it’ll be something, or someone else that brings up that killer app.

I just can’t wait to use it once it’s there.

I’m not asking a question about speed here; I worry that with the profligate new networks like Twitter (and its environs in the form of apps, API [ab]users and tools), LiveFyre (with its massive potential for both quality content and for trolling), and FourSquare and Gowalla along with other location-based get-off-the-computer social networks… I worry that the beauty of the centralised network, which I still feel is the best way this can work, is deteriorating.

There’s a speech in He’s Just Not That In To You, where Drew Barrymore is lamenting having to call a guy, leaving him a voicemail, to which he responds by email, so she Facebooks him – and so on, apoplexy. Is this really happening? I mean, I email people. Or I IM with them. If you have any of my four IM accounts, they’re always on because I’m a BlackBerry user and I’m a geek like that. People can pester me wherever they wish to, through whatever network, and are likely to get back one of two things: An email, or an IM. Because that’s what works. I like centralisation, even if I do enjoy being in the loop. I’m far from anonymous: Yes, I’m on LinkedIn, yes, I have a Flickr account, both of which are very disused, as well as a Fiend- I mean FriendFeed page which is similarly disused and mostly remote controlled by Twitter. I’ve even put up a couple of very low quality YouTube videos. I’m on Twitter all the freaking time. By all rights, I should be one of those people who’s all over the place and simultaneously impossible to get a hold of.

But I’m not. Because I think that practice is stupid. Still, businesses start up every day building new and diverse networks with new calls to action, innovating the methods by which we communicate with each other and leaving a startled majority of us wondering what happened to the email we used to be getting and no longer are.

Networks with plans have limits. They’re sort of like gods that way, the pick an element to be divine in, and sort of suck at everything else. If you want to kill a god, hurl its anathema at it and watch the sparks fly. Facebook? Clearly, Mafia Wars. Twitter? Probably spam bots. The thing is that these networks keep popping up, no matter how much damage the originals absorb, and whether these parent concepts survive the onslaught of abuse.

But do we need them?

For me to hold my interest in a given network, I have to treat it like a friend. Sure, my friends are on the network, and I interact with them, but the network entity itself has to have some meaning to me, I have to be able to get along with it, cultivate an interest in maintaining it. Since I started using Twitter in earnest, almost exclusively to connect with people otherwise entirely out of my reach, I’ve entirely abandoned FriendFeed – Twitter did a better job. Sorry, I’m a fair-weather networker. I’ve also scaled back on Facebook almost entirely – I haven’t posted a status update in days, and going to the web interface is a chore. I check statuses of my friends when I have thirty seconds at work, again on my BlackBerry. It takes energy to cultivate more than this, and I’m not scaleable and I know it.

So when I got introduced to LiveFyre, I decided not to do what I did with Twitter – which was get on, dive in, and then get annoyed that it behaved differently than Facebook, which at the time was my best networking friend, and subsequently abandon the thing for almost a year. I’ve taken a bit of time to analyze before diving in, and I’m not sure I like what I see. There’s nothing inherently wrong with LF itself, other than being a very directed outlet for specific kinds of content, which makes it more like a community blog than a social network.

The problem I’m having is with the idea that there must be all of these networks for everyone, and if you want to catch all of your friends, make sure you have everyone in your contact list accessible as often as you feel they need to be, you have to set up so many listening posts you’ll go into stack overflow. It’s a futile exercise. But it’s necessary one in a lot of instances, isn’t it?

But it brings me back to this:

One. How useful are global networks – I’m talking about the Facebooks and MySpaces of the world here, where the entire call to action is “Play Nice With Others” – when it comes to quickly and reliably getting accurate and succinct information from your contacts to you?

And Two. How much utility can there ever be in balkanized echo chambers when the limits of the available actions are so heavily built into the systems that no out-of-purpose use is possible?