Identity, embodied

It's hard to believe that I was posting up to three times daily on this blog just a few months ago. Since dedicating myself to creating, launching and growing Blog Friends with Jof and Benjie in June this year, my to-do list has been continuously overflowing with design, administrative and business tasks, leaving little room in my schedule let alone my head for "identity" blogging.

That said, the real problem has not been a lack of time—it's been a profound shift of point of view on my part. For three years, I was on the outside looking in on the world of web-enabled business. Sitting on a cloud at 15,000 feet and surveying the landscape stretching out below me became a comfortable habit, and the resulting insights and musings ended up on weaverluke blog.

Not that I wasn't working diligently throughout those three years to realise my "i-together" vision of a world where each individual could explore and express their unique identity in rich community contexts. Far from it: I dedicated much of my spare time and my life savings (and then some), to create with various programmers three prototype applications of that vision, and wrote any number of supporting business plan drafts. Then Facebook's Platform came along, and I realised that there was a great market opportunity for a very specific aspect of the i-together vision—the social blog post sharing and discovery service that is now Blog Friends.

Soon afterwards Jof, Benjie and I launched Blog Friends into the world, rapidly gaining real users with real opinions and preferences. There were suddenly a million things to do by yesterday just to keep the service running, let alone planning and building new service features, iterating the business plan, networking with potential employees, partners and investors, and lastly—but actually most importantly—communicating one-to-one with our wonderful and loyal users.

June, July, August, September, October... The months have sped by and weaverluke blog has languished. It feels rather ironic that I've co-created a service for bloggers and blog readers, yet seem to have lost my own blogging mojo so catastrophically! We also now have a blog for Blog Friends itself that will need tending.

So how could what weaverluke blog has been transition into something that supports and is fed by what my life has become? In other words, what's the common thread (a weaver always needs a thread) that runs through my passions for identity and for Blog Friends?

Considering that question for a moment, I realise that as we adjust the designs for Blog Friends v1 by a pixel here, a shade of blue there, and as we plough through the nitty gritty numbers of the i-together business plan, it is all too easy for me to forget what so excited me about i-together and Blog Friends in the first place.

We are all preciously unique, but we have so much in common too. We thrive when we acknowledge and celebrate both our individuality and our commonalities.

I wanted to create a service that taps into these insights to help people discover and share stuff that really interests them, easily and intuitively. And I really feel that with the forthcoming "v1" release of Blog Friends, we are getting a whole lot closer to that goal.

V1 introduces a full-page feed reader, rich feedback options to tune your topic and author preferences and a whole lot more. Jof, Benjie and I have been grafting away for a couple of months on v1, and we're just days away from launching it into private beta testing now (do let me know, along with your facebook id please, if you'd like an invitation!).

Anyhow, this rambling and anecdotal post has wandered off topic, just like my mind has wandered from the purity and abstraction of "identity" these last months into the challenge of actually making something with and for real people! Because at the end of the day, it's all about relationship, right, this identity stuff? About sharing your passion and dreams with others, and witnessing them in theirs.

Hopefully, I can start to do some more of that on this blog and at the Blog Friends Blog from now on.

Nuanced relationship and Facebook

Michael Arrington writes:

When you confirm a friend on facebook, you are asked to state how you know the person. But the options are simply too narrow. “We hooked up” is rarely an appropriate way to describe someone you know through blogging, networking, etc. In fact, most of the options are not really useful for the millions of non-college student adults flooding into the service. It’s time to add more options.

The underlying problem here is that we all think about and express the nature of our relationships in different ways, but computer systems aren't yet very good at inferring similarities between these different descriptions. Which is why they straightjacket us into using a few, standardised descriptions, rather than allowing us to make up our own.

Roll on natural language research for the inspiration of better data integration system design! Until we progress in that area, I suspect these kind of data standardisation issues will remain rather intractable.

Identity web as mirror

Joshua Porter writes:

Over time, we’re going to learn a tremendous amount about how people interact socially with one another because we can record things on the Web. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had lately with designers that ended up like “well, we’re doing design, too, but we’re really doing a ton of psychology”. The amount of effort and design energy being focused on the social interactions of people around a service is growing.

I have often observed on this blog that networked technology is a tool that allows us to extend our innate ways of relating to one another and expressing our identity. Interesting, then, to be reminded that it can also provide us with insights about how we do these things by reflecting our behaviours back to us.

So the Identity Web could be a hologram, superstring universe and mirror all at once? Well, I guess if we could contain it within a single metaphor, it would lose its mystery!

Virtual relationships—eroding authenticity?

Kermit Snelson laments the erosion of authenticity in a world of virtual relationships:

Even if the old question "Who are you?" has increasingly lost its meaning as we all become Google-able, another old question should probably remain: "Have we met?"

I'm sure that's very true. You just can't beat a good old face to face natter—which is why I'm excited to about the great new venue for London OpenCoffee, the tech entrepreneur and investor meetup event on Thursday mornings!

Complexity and risk in branding and life

Grant McCracken writes about complexity and risk-taking for brand marketing:

What we want are brands that invite our involvement and then reward it. Involvement takes complexity and the willingness to open the brand to a variety of interpretations...

Much like with interpersonal relationships, really. Rewarding relationships always entail the risk of messiness and vunerability.