Identity and startups: an introduction

Why is understanding identity important for startups?

What strategic relevance does identity have for technology startups? The answer, in a nutshell, is that understanding and catering for people's experience of identity—individuals' unique experience of who or what they, other people, things and information are—seems to be key to understanding how to create and monetise value in our increasingly fluid and personalisable society.

People are coming to expect to be able to customise and integrate more and more areas of their life in their own, individually unique way. To be competitive, startups must work out how to enable that customisation and integration in a way that is radically more effective than their competition. And more often than not, innovations in technology and its applications provide that opportunity.

The problem—a complex topic covered in an inconsistent and piecemeal way

Sounds simple, doesn't it? Just work out how your target users experience identity and build your service accordingly.

However, there's a catch: identity, even in its practical, applied (as opposed to abstractly philosophical) sense, turns out to be a hugely complex and multi-faceted subject, spanning psychology, economics, branding, business theory, law, politics, anthropology and many other fields. You simply cannot reduce identity to any one of these perspectives if you hope to understand it clearly, because identity is something that informs our whole life! Yet while there already exists a good deal of research on and discussion of each niche area of identity studies—much of it of great merit in its own terms—there has been little work done on developing cross-sector approaches to understanding identity.

Where is the poor entrepreneur to start?

The solution—an integrated conceptual framework for startups and identity

What seems to be needed is a clear, comprehensive and integrated conceptual framework within which startups can plan their identity strategy. Such a framework would enable startups to identify opportunities, threats and unknowns that identity represents for their business across commercial, technological, legal and social spheres—in a straightforward and consistent way.

In a forthcoming series of posts over the coming weeks and months, myself and a number of co-authors, each a thought leader in their specialist field, will develop just such an overarching conceptual framework for startups and identity.

We will begin by looking at the opportunities, threats and unknown factors around identity that digital networks—with a special focus on the web—raise for startups. Subsequent posts will go on to explore mobile, governmental, legal, branding, retail, banking, mainstream media and psychosocial aspects of the problem space. Links to each post will appear below as they are published.

I'm looking forward to learning a lot in the process of co-authoring these posts—I hope you will accompany me and my collaborators on the journey, and help us along the way with your comments and criticisms!

Flooding the personal information market

Glyn Moody on the benefits of enabling supersurveillance through radical openness:

Hm, a novel approach:

So it dawned on him: If being candid about his flights could clear his name, why not be open about everything? "I've discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away," he says, grinning as he sips his venti Black Eye. Elahi relishes upending the received wisdom about surveillance. The government monitors your movements, but it gets things wrong. You can monitor yourself much more accurately. Plus, no ambitious agent is going to score a big intelligence triumph by snooping into your movements when there's a Web page broadcasting the Big Mac you ate four minutes ago in Boise, Idaho. "It's economics," he says. "I flood the market."

Not only effective, but fun, by the sounds of it!

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.

A paen to the social web

A great post from Euan Semple which resists partial quotation, so here it is in full (presented under the terms of a Creative Commons license!):

A recent client engagement combined with reading Nick Carr's review of Everything Is Miscellaneous have yet again made me question whether those of us who drank The Cluetrain kool-aid seven years ago are mad or simply facing the growing pains of a new world as it emerges from the old.

Sometimes it seems that the naysayers are right. There is nothing fundamently different about the web and human nature stays the same no matter what technologies we have to hand. Having read John Gray's Straw Dogs I am aware that ideas of progress are pretty relative and while that at one level technology has enabled us to save more people through medicine it has also enabled us to kill more people more efficiently. Did the printing press make the world a better place or did it just allow ideas to circulate faster and wider?

The apparent simplicity of what we are talking about also presents challenges. In a world where real work takes effort and things worth doing are hard the apparent promise of the transformative effect of "getting it" appears, and sometimes feels, naive. Helping people to "get it" appears a soft option in contrast to doing or building.

And yet, and yet ....

I am only half way through David's book but I have to say I am loving it just as much as I loved The Cluetrain and Small Pieces Loosely Joined. What has happened to me since embracing the web has felt transformational and enabled connections and relationships that would never have happened otherwise. And these are not just appealing because they enable cozy conversations between like minded people. They enable exchange of ideas at a frequency and a quality that I never experienced before. I have also seen at first hand the effect this capability can have on an organisation. Being able to get quick, quality answers to questions, get collective heads around major cultural issues, and fostering connections that spark innovation are all non-trivial things that all organisations aspire to but which are notoriously difficult without web approaches.

It is good to catch ourselves sometimes and question the things we take for granted - whatever our views. But I am glad to report that I still get excited about the ways that the web is making the world different as described so well by David and others and I feel lucky that I get to pass on that excitement to the people I work with.

Ironically, given that Nick Carr makes much of the fact that he didn't get past page 9 of David's book I gave up on his tedius, rather self-indulgent post after the first couple of paragraphs.

Euan, you really put your finger on the issue here. The naysayers are too busy seeing the fragments of the evoving web to see either the mysterious and majestic evolution of the whole or the incremental increases in intelligence enjoyed by each one of us who engages authentically within conversations with others who we just wouldn't have been able to dialogue with pre-web.

I know that I am a more effective thinker and communicator than I used to be thanks to my blogging (although I also know there's still infinite room for improvement—which, of course, is a great motivator to continue the process), and I see you and all the other bloggers I read becoming better thinkers and communicators each post, week, month and year that goes by.

What a blessing!

The intrinsic limitations of identifiers

Mike Neuenschwander, wrestling hopefully with OpenID, has encountered there an intrinsic problem with identifiers:

OpenID ... calls into sharp focus something I’ve believed for years. It’s a kind of axiom, so I’d like to give it a name. I’ll call it, “identifiers.axiom.neunmike’s.axiomproxy.info”—that way you can easily refer to it unambiguously from anywhere. Here it is:

There are no identifiers, only attributes

Names are slippery. Most people have many more than one legal name, none of which are unique. They also have several dozen nicknames. There’s no practical way to get any of these every-day-use names onto a global namespace. And what’s a name after all but a synthetic attribute—a foreign key that we hope the receiving party stores somewhere so we can remember them later? Names are invaluable communication aids, but they have little to do with recognition, which is what’s at issue in most identity management contexts. Biologically, creatures don’t recognize others based on names but rather the confluence of attributes appearing within a certain context.

Lao Tzu (who goes by several dozen names) had a pretty good post on this idea over 2000 years ago. In a section called “Ineffability,” he writes:

The Way that can be told of is not an Unvarying Way;
The names that can be named are not unvarying names.
It was from the Nameless that Heaven and Earth sprang;
The named is but the mother that rears the ten thousand creatures, each after its kind. (chap. 1, tr. Waley)

I understand why from a programmer’s perspective, it would be so much more convenient if everybody could simply have one globally unique, unambiguous, resolvable name. But such a quaint design constitutes a wanton disregard for reality.

The tech industry is adolescently ID-fixated. But I’ve had it to here with IDs! Would somebody please start seeing my avatars as something more than identification objects? So here’s to being an OpenAttribute power user!

I absolutely, wholeheartedly agree with Mike's axiom. I'd go further still, and extend the thought it embodies to its logical conclusion: the location metaphor for digital networks (like the web) that the concept of unique "identifiers" entail is completely unsuited to the modelling of our perceptions of identity—or our imagination—which are themselves not bounded by 3D limitations.

The Green Web?

Katie Fehrenbacher writes:

[O]rganizations and companies are gravitating towards using the web to organize and communicate about climate change. Media, content distribution, collaboration tools and communications are all migrating to the web, so why not put them to use for a crucial issue.

The topic of climate change is also uniquely suited to the web. The information is often localized and action-oriented — what’s the best public transportation route in my city, or where do I recycle my e-waste. The topic also has a feeling of urgency (if not at times alarmist) which helps to quicky disseminate it around the web.

I'm sure Katie is right that the web can become an incredible tool for concerted and focused positive Green action. On the other hand, the production, use and disposal of technology itself creates a very significant negative environmental impact. Let's just hope that the Green benefits of the web begin to outweigh its costs. As both an ardent technologist and commited inhabitant of Planet Earth, I sincerely hope they will, and massively so.

Justin.tv—sousveillance personified

Jamais Cascio points us towards Justin.tv:

"Justin of Justin.tv [...] wears a live-streaming wireless camera on his hat all day, every day, recording everything he sees."

This guy is sousveillance personified! Not sure I can see hat-cam wearing catching on with the public at large, though—can you?

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!

Identity: personal and personalised information

If we take the subjective experience of identity as being the most practically-useful definition of identity (as readers will know I do on this blog!), then we can say the following of an individual's online projection of their identity:

The online projection of your identity is made up of information that is both personal (about you) and personalised (of interest to you).

Online identity is often equated exclusively with personal information, but that approach proves to be pretty limiting for designing personalised services in the pseudonymous and probabilistic world of the web.

Taking the broader concept of identity, conversely, we can approach the intimately related topics of personalisation and identity management within a self-consistent conceptual framework. And that should make thinking about all this stuff simpler!

Of course, a observer may not be able to tie your personalised information to you as a unique entity in any given instance: for example, Google cannot when you make an anonymous search. However, Google will be able to infer the valuable insight that you belong to a certain demographic or group identity from your search queries and the links you click in the search results (and track you as a defacto persistent individual or group identity via your IP address on your return, of course, unless you know how to hide that information from them).

Furthermore, your personalised information may be far more detailed and rich than your personal information is. After all, it includes not just the huge quantities of information we generate implicitly through our surfing and searching, but also the information we explicitly (co-)create and express—such as this information I am expressing right now, on this blog! (In codifying it into my own words, I am literally "personalising" the information that I have absorbed from others or encountered in my own imagination.)

Your personalised information is not only relevant to your own experience of your identity, then: it is also highly relevant to observers of your online presence who seek to obtain insight into your identity (and then show you just the right adverts, for example). Personalised information allows those observers to build a much more complete, albeit fuzzier, picture of your identity than they could just from your (uniquely-identifying) personal information.

And, of course, should observers be able to tie your personal and personalised information together, they gain oversight of a very complete picture of your identity indeed.

Technologies of connectivity—and alienation

Sherry Turkle is techo-disillusioned. She writes:

Thanks to technology, people have never been more connected—or more alienated.

...

We live in techno-enthusiastic times, and we are most likely to celebrate our gadgets. Certainly the advertising that sells us our devices has us working from beautiful, remote locations that signal our status. We are connected, tethered, so important that our physical presence is no longer required. There is much talk of new efficiencies; we can work from anywhere and all the time. But tethered life is complex; it is helpful to measure our thrilling new networks against what they may be doing to us as people.

Sherry offers us "five troubles that try my tethered soul" (she clearly has something of a poetic bent):

• There is a new state of the self, itself
• Are we losing the time to take our time?
• The tethered adolescent
• Virtuality and its discontents
• Split attention

Sherry's full post is well worth a read—I found it hard to find much to disagree with, although I would suggest that just because we increasingly have the opportunity to be "networked" in every moment, that doesn't mean that we cannot learn to turn down that opportunity as our soul's care requires. I'm certainly enjoying putting some boundaries around my blog reading time (strictly on the exercise bike in the morning only!).

Exogenously unbounded identity

Kermit Snelson writes:

A few days ago, David Weinberger issued the following challenge to the readers of his new book: “Can you come up with the Everything Is Miscellaneous elevator pitch? Lord knows, I can’t.”

How about this: “To equate identity with location is an instrument of autocracy.”

A more verbose but less gnomic summary of the argument might go like this: In the physical world, everything must occupy a single location. In the realm of identity, however, different rules apply. The fact that the Mona Lisa cannot “be” in the Louvre and in the Prado simultaneously doesn’t mean that it cannot simultaneously “be” a piece of old wood, a masterpiece, and a tourist attraction. Laws of physics and laws of identity are not of the same ontological order.

I couldn't agree more. Indeed, this was one of the key points that John Madelin and I argued in our white paper of 2006: we unconsciously reproduce the 3D limitations of our physical world in the location metaphor of the the web's addressing architecture (DNS), but in so doing we distort the web's ability to mediate our exogenously unbounded, subjective perceptions of identity.

More of my thoughts on the original post as a whole are in its comments section.

Widgets and identity

The Chinwag event last night on "Media Widgetized"* was well attended by people from startups and big technology brands alike. The panel all had interesting and informed things to say, and Steve Bowbrick was a funny and effective Chair. Two good writeups of the content of the debate are here and here.

For readers who don't know what a widget is, take a look at the first writeup link above for a choice of explanations and a picture of some widgets.

My identity angle: widgets enable us to track, interact with and remix diverse information-based "stuff" (weather updates, stock prices, mini games, our social network profiles etc.) within the unifying framework of our own online personas, both public (blog, public start page etc.) and private (desktop widgets, private start page etc.).

Widgets are as much about performing our identity superpublically as they are about witnessing the world through the filter of our identity (i.e. our preferences and interests). Which is precisely why the commercial world is at once desperately keen to leverage widgets to extend the reach and resonance of their brand, and yet also petrified of their potential for disrupting and subverting that brand.

A notional example: would McDonalds want a Big Mac mini game widget placed ironically on a high-traffic blog documenting that company's role in the ongoing destruction of rainforests? I think probably not. It will be interesting to see how masters of big media marketing like McDonald ("I'm loooooving it!") cope as the web encroaches increasingly on their branding comfort zones.

One thing's for sure, though: widgets are conspiring to make the process of brand identity evolution a whole lot more fluid, transparent and predicated on authentic engagement and relationship by the brand with its community. And that has to be a good thing.

*"Widgetized" spelled with a z for search engine optimisation, seemingly—though quite why Chinwag prefer to get the attention of Americans and Australians at the expense of us Brits who are the ones likely to attend their events I'm not entirely sure!

C21st living: act locally, be surveilled globally?

Bill Thompson writes:

Those of us living in the west, with cheap easy access to computers and the internet and a sophisticated technological infrastructure surrounding us, are increasingly living our lives online.

This is no more frightening than any other vast social change, but it will be resisted by many who see in the loss of privacy something threatening, who believe it is dangerous or dehumanising or somehow against nature.

But we should never forget that we make human nature, it is not given to us, and we can therefore remake it.

Our modern conception of privacy and of the nature of the individual is a product of the industrial age that is now passing, so it should not surprise us that we are finding new ways of constructing an identity online.

As I spread myself around over the network, updating my Facebook profile, commenting on MySpace, flying through Second Life, blogging, twittering, updating my calendar and posting photos and videos and audio I am finding a new way to be Bill Thompson.

While it's a nice sentiment, I think we need to consider the broad sense of Bill's notion of "remaking human nature" in the context of the insights of evolutionary psychology: our psychological experience is founded on our evolutionary heritage, which has, for example, seemingly optimised us for social interaction within relatively small groups.

However, at the same time, I wholeheartedly agree with the previous clause of the same sentence: that "our modern conception of privacy and of the nature of the individual is a product of the industrial age that is now passing." I have myself argued that, in a world where information flows ever more freely and pervasively, we have no choice but to completely re-conceive the role of privacy in our lives. Given the relatively recent provenance (as Bill points out) of the Western concepts of privacy and individual identity, it seems likely that their roots only penetrate the topsoil of our culture rather than the deep clay of our evolutionarily selected traits (such as our predeliction for interacting within small groups), so it may be that we can reinvent this aspect of our experience.

Perhaps we will continue to seek out small groups to engage with proactively while at the same time coming to tolerate, accept or even enjoy the fact that our audience for that engagement may be unknowably diverse and global.

My question remains:

How can we find sustenance and protection for our intricate and bounded, biologically-evolved, deeper, softer selves in the always-on "surface" world we are creating?

Identity web as hologram

A metaphor that I like to use for the identity web is that of a hologram. Just like when you shatter a hologram, each piece reflects cloudy images of the whole original, the identity web promises to embody an ever-greater proportion of the web’s knowledge in each of its nodes—which, in principal, would come to obviate the need for a location-based discovery and navigation metaphor for the web.

I am brought to mind of those multi-dimensional tangles of superstrings that physicists tell us may be coiled up within each of the tiniest spaces of our universe. Perhaps that is our challenge in evolving an identity web—to roll up the web into a billion locations, thereby making the very concept of information “location” redundant?

And yet, each node also defines what it is not by its differences from the whole. The piece of the hologram embodies the whole within the unique context of its identity.

[This post was inspired by a blog conversation with Kermit Snelson—thanks, Kermit!]

At Chinwag tomorrow

In case any readers are going to be in the central London area tomorrow evening, I will be attending the Chinwag Live event on "Media Widgetized" and would love to see you there!

Sexuality, violence and vunerability

Seamus McCauley points out the illogicality of the media's conflation of real and virtual paedophillia in their discussion of recent disturbing happenings in Second Life. He also contrasts this reaction to virtual sexual abuse with the widespread tolerance of extreme virtual violence. I recommend a reading of the post in full, too long and integrated to reproduce here.

My thoughts: Sexuality can be one of the most vunerable and emotive aspects of human identity, so it's perhaps no surprise that people often switch off their higher brains when thinking and talking about its abuses. By contrast, violence numbs and brutalises us, and it seems we find it far easier to distance ourselves emotionally from its virtual depiction.

Google as "the Internet"

Seamus McCauley muses on "Google" as synonym for "the Internet" (click the link for a nice bonus photo illustration!):

I've been wondering for a while how it came to pass that "Google" became visual shorthand for "the Internet" amongst advertisers.

The current campaign for Thomson holidays exhorts holidaymakers to use "our Google Maps" (which turns out to be a slightly customised version of what is very clearly Google's Google Maps). Mobile phone companies in particular, when they started wanting us to know that we could access the web on our phones, showed us phones with Google on them. Here's another one.

So I'm intrigued by the sudden cultural shift implied by Nokia's latest online ad for the N800 (left), a phone with Internet access, majoring on the BBC website and Flickr and MySpace and Wikipedia without a mention of Google. "Take the Internet to new places", it says. Or, in other words - not just Google search.

Google has an incredibly powerful brand (BBC) that for the last couple of years has been semiotically synonymous with the Internet. Assuming, not unreasonably, that advertisers are on the cutting edge of understanding cultural significance, that psychological dominance of what people mean by the Internet may be coming to an end as consumers are considered able to accept more nuanced symbols of the web.

When millions of people identify your brand with the Internet itself, you know you have a decent business. Whether or not Google can continue to convince the masses that they are "the Internet" will play a huge part in determining their future fortunes.

However, it's also intriguing to note that the growing privacy concerns around Google provide them with the inverse challenge of convincing people that they are not too omniscient for their users' comfort—when striving for omniscience kind of goes with the territory of trying to be "the Internet". This would seem to pose Google with something of a strategic and branding conundrum.

There's money in that there identity—we just don't quite know where yet.

[also left as a comment on Seamus's post]

Participation ladders and value spirals

Charlene Li at Forrester blogs about their new "Social Technographics" report. The report's executive summary:

Many companies approach social computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed – a blog here, a podcast there – to achieve a marketing goal. But a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for. Forrester categorizes social computing behaviors into a ladder with six levels of participation; we use the term "Social Technographics" to describe analyzing a population according to its participation in these levels. Brands, Web sites, and any other company pursuing social technologies should analyze their customers' Social Technographics first, and then create a social strategy based on that profile.

There's a nice "participation ladder" diagram in Charlene's post which I dare not reproduce here from fear of their terrifying Terms of Use. ; ) Nevertheless, what I find interesting about the ladder metaphor is that it focuses the potential for a customer's relationship with a company to evolve to encompass ever-greater degrees of pro-activity on that customer's part. This is very much like my Value Spiral metaphor in the "Towards the Identity Society" paper (section 5.2.2 in this pdf). (And I guess if you combine ladders and spirals, you get DNA...)

I suspect that human relationships in any context may be usefully described in terms of such iterated evolution. Of course, that evolution ceases when one or other party in the relationship feels that the relationship has reached a ceiling of potential value—there's only so much personal information I wish to share with any given social web service, for example, and this is where Google may begin to run into trouble as it continues to diversify its integrated web service offerings.

Speaking at chinwag live: dark side of social media

I have been invited to speak at the chinwag live event on June 19 in Soho, London. The topic is the "dark side of social media":

Despite the hype there are downsides to social media - virtual problems are invading our real lives, or is it vice versa..?

Identity theft, scurrilous accusations, libel, stalking, scams and even violence. Social media, once hailed as the great new "Naked Conversation" where the planet would talk to itself in a spirit of open debate and companies would 'crowd source' fantastic new products, is starting to turn sour.

High profile bloggers like Rachel From North London and Kathy Sierra have been stalked online. Teenagers are finding out the downside to having a MySpace page as cyber-bullying takes off.

Brands are finding that their carefully crafted marketing campaigns are being remixed and mashed-up in a way they never intended. Political sites are swarmed with negative comments. Comment spam is hampering open debate. Splogs are stealing content. Social Media is turning out to have a very unsocial dark side. What can be done about it?

Can an online code of conduct have a hope of succeeding? Will freedom of speech be affected? How can organisations prevent their interactions with social media from backfiring? Chinwag Live: The Dark Side of Social Media will look at all these questions with a panel of experts.

Lots to get our teeth into, then; it promises to be a pretty lively debate!

Is Justin Timberlake the product of Cumulative Advantage?

Joshua Porter blogs about a study by Duncan Watts called "Is Justin Timberlake the product of Cumulative Advantage?" (the title being a shrewd piece of Search Engine Optimisation if ever I saw it ; ). The study describes "a sociology experiment that has huge implications for the display of aggregate data on social web sites". In Joshua's words:

Aggregate displays are everywhere, from the book ratings at Amazon.com to the most-emailed articles at the New York Times to the number of diggs at Digg.com. They’re a primary element of social design. They not only let people know how their actions relate to others, but they also alter the behavior of those who view them.

...

[The] result [of the study] could be seen as a confirmation of the bandwagon effect, a known bias resulting from our tendency to follow the crowd. This bias is probably the result of ignorance…if we don’t know something we tend to rely on the opinion of others. In this case users probably paid attention to the download numbers because they didn’t have any prior experience with the music.

We identify with things and people we see others identifying with. Like super-intelligent sheep. Ok, the super-intelligent bit is moot. ; )

Google wants your voice print

Now Google wants our voice prints!? That Google identity walled garden is getting more verdant by the day, and the little doorway ever more overgrown...

Google's defacto "identity system"

Scott Lemon discovers that "Google wants MORE of your identity!":

Well FINALLY, Google adds the ability to annotate and more [on Google Maps] through their new My Maps features ... BUT ... I MUST create an account and be tracked by Google in order to use the features!! What the heck? I can't just hack out a quick annotated map for a friend or family without providing information to Google about who I am and having them permanently note my interest in some specific point on earth?

Once again ... the average person has NO idea they are now going to have even more records kept of every place they have marked or annotated, and when they did it. Google continues to gather even more information about you ... who you are ... what you do ... where you do. Amazing.

I know a number of people who are pretty annoyed that they have to use a gmail email account (which they may not even use regularly for email) to access services such as Blogger and Google Groups. I am one of those people!

With the rapid rise of OpenID as a means of individuals integrating their personae across web service providers, I suspect Google's attempt to lock users into Google's own defacto "identity system" could become a real competitive weakness for them at some point.

Web site über-identities

Fred Wilson riffs on Rich Skrenta's observations about the standardisation of web site types:

Rich Skrenta points out the web pages have begun to be standardized.

Back in 1995, when the web was new, visitors to a new site would lean forward, squint at the page, and try to figure out how it worked.

That metaphor didn't last. People don't lean forward and squint at web pages to figure out how they work anymore. They instantly recognize -- within 100 milliseconds -- which class of site a page belong to -- search result, retail browse, blog, newspaper, spam site, message board, etc. And if they don't recognize what kind of page they're on, they generally give up and hit the back button.

That's an interesting observation and I think its true... Maybe the web has become like every other media before it. It's developing its own categories of services. In television, a show is a sitcom, a drama, a news show, etc, etc. It doesn't take very long to figure out what kind of TV show you are watching.

Is this good or bad? Has most of the innovation on the web already happened? Are we now in mainstream mode, sucking as much cash out of a mature model as we can?

I am not entirely sure. There have been a number of new web page metaphors successfully introduced in the past five years. The wiki style, the blog style, the web video page, the photo page model, etc. I think we aren't done with innovating, but it's interesting to think that the web has become so standardized in such a short time. Just a bit over ten years and it's certainly not the chaotic adventureland it once was.

We could recast this issue in terms of identity. There is a natural tension between the attraction to users, from an ease-of-use point of view, of websites which conform to a stable über-identity (a "blog" a "wiki" a "news site" and so forth) on one hand and the lure of innovative, sometimes useful, yet often disorientating website features on the other ("is it a video site? Is it a splog? Is it a plane?").

Of course, the huge majority of innovative site types languish or die with the pioneer site itself—they may offer marginally or even significantly improved utility over the standard models, but not sufficiently so to counterbalance the cost to the user of learning a new set of interactive metaphors. Sadly, thousands of "web 2.0" sites fall into this category.

It is only when a site type that offers a particular demographic a readily comprehensible, compelling and radically differentiated value proposition in comparison to existing site types arrives or evolves that the status quo of stable website über-identities is disrupted. Blogger and Typepad did it for blogs; Wikipedia and Mediawiki for wikis; Digg and Reddit (and others) for content rating services.

That is not to say, however, that successful website types must be mainstream: with the explosion of the widget universe, there are myriad opportunities for entrepreneurs to target very specific demographics—and particular types of web site may well evolve for very particular market segments. A niche service like MyBlogLog, which serves bloggers and their communities, is a great example here.

Wikipedia on "Value"

I just looked up Wikipedia's definition of "value" and found an intriguing collection of articles:

• Value (mathematics) -- the value of a variable in mathematics.
• Value (personal and cultural) -- the principles, standards, or quality which guides human actions
• Value (economics) -- the market worth or estimated worth of commodities, services, assets, or work.
• Value theory -- in ethics, aesthetics and other evaluative matters
• Value (marketing)
  
• Value (computer science)
• Value (law)
• Value (semiotics)
• Value (colorimetry) -- a measure of white or black in color

I think I'll take a good look at these and anything else interesting on the subject I can find—I'm thinking of writing a blog post series constellated around value as a central concept. It feels like that's the direction my thinking about identity is inexorably leading me, so I figured I might as well roll up my sleeves!

Social networking: eroding our ability to contain emotions?

Liz Else and Sherry Turkle ask:

Is social networking changing the way people relate to each other?

For some people, things move from "I have a feeling, I want to call a friend" to "I want to feel something, I need to make a call". In either case, what is not being cultivated is the ability to be alone and to manage and contain one's emotions. When technology brings us to the point where we're used to sharing our thoughts and feelings instantaneously, it can lead to a new dependence, sometimes to the extent that we need others in order to feel our feelings in the first place.

This is a really good point. We all need quiet time to digest life and incubate our dreams. Think I'll stop blogging now and go and meditate a while.

[Via Brian at The Liberator Magazine]

False product memory: a love/hate thing?

Reader Andy Pearson kindly emailed me a link to this post by Clive Thompson on a fascinating bit of research into website interactivity and false memory:

Can an interactive web site produce false memories?

Possibly so, according to a fascinating paper to be published this month in the Journal of Consumer Research by Ann Schlosser, a business professor at the University of Washington. Schlosser performed an intriguing experiment: She took two groups of people and had them check out two different web sites devoted to the same digital camera. One site included static pictures; the other was interactive, allowing users to play around with a virtual version of the product.

Later, she tested them on their ability to recall details about the camera. She intentionally included details that were false, but sufficiently plausible that they might have been true. The result? The people who viewed the interactive demo of the camera were much more likely than the folks who'd only viewed static images to "remember" the false details as being present. Or another way of putting it: The interactive demo was more likely to produce false memories of the product -- potential buyers who thought the camera could do things it can't.

Why? Schlosser theorizees that it's partly because interactivity encourages more "certainty" in our memories, and thus increases the likelihood that we'll believe suggestively false details to be true.

I pondered for a while how this phenomenon might be understood in terms of identity. Then it struck me that, when a person interacts with the digital representation of a product, the difference between a one-dimensional interaction on one hand, and a rich and fluid interaction on the other is rather akin to the difference between a platonic and romantic interpersonal relationship.

With a platonic friend, we experience the relationship from a relatively consistent perspective; boundaries are clear, the social and functional context of the relationship firmly established.

With a lover, by contrast, our whole world view is turned upside down and inside out as we experience the boundaries between Self and Other becoming deliciously (and sometimes alarmingly!) fluid, and we feel the soul of the Other resonate in depths of our psyche that we visit seldom or never. In our desire for union with our lover, we want to know everything about her—and what we don't or can't know, we happily imagine.

Is it too far fetched to imagine, then, that our greater willingness to believe that we know information about a product when we have experienced an interaction with that product that is relatively rich, fluid—intimate, even—could be no more than the effects of an incipient romance?

On the other hand, it would also be interesting to know whether or not the false memory effect arose in the case of products which the subject fluidly interacted with but ultimately disliked, as well as with those they liked. This would actually also make sense to me, as we tend to project identity traits onto those we feel strongly about positively or negatively—if someone slights me, I might obsess about their reasons for doing so, imagining all sorts of fictional motivations on their part.

Subtle walls

Responding to a post by Google's Matt Cutts on the open aspects of Google's strategy regarding personal information, Nic Carr ponders the subtler aspects of information "lockin":

"As we consolidate more of our personal data into a single company's databases - whether it's Google or another firm - how 'easy' is it, really, to withdraw our information? The answer is: It's not easy at all.

"In a comment on Cutts's post, Philipp Lenssen gets at this issue:

I agree that Google is rather open in these regards and allows you to export a lot. One thing to remember though is that as soon as Google products cross-integrate — e.g. a link from Gmail to add an event to Google Calendar — the costs for users of switching away are increased for any single product. As a practical example, let’s say I love Gmail and I hate Google Calendar, so I want to move to competitor Acme Calendar. Great, you guys offer exporting functionality for my events, so I’ll quickly move them from Acme. But you guys don’t allow me to set my preferred Gmail calendar integration software… so now I end up with a somewhat broken Gmail feature. This is not at all alarming on this scale, but it can be a problem for users down the road when Google heavily increases cross-integration (Google Checkout is being pushed in search result today, for example, cross-integrating another two theoretically 'loosely coupled' services)."

In terms of identity, Google is effectively encouraging me to put together as many fragments as possible of my online personae within the Google walled garden, reassuring me all the while: "look, you're free to take any or all of your personae fragments and skiddaddle any time!" However, what Google are not enabling me to do is to embody my online identity in "small pieces loosely joined", where some of those pieces may be entrusted to Google but others to other service providers. They could, easily, but that would hit profits.

Identity lock-in. MySpace, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google are all at it. The telcos are at it and the retailers are at it. The government are at it. The marketing messages may be changing, but the commercial (and political) realities are still very much entrenched in this Bad Business.

Wikipedia, credentials and authority

BBC News reports:

Internet site Wikipedia has been hit by controversy after the disclosure that a prominent editor had assumed a false identity complete with fake PhD.

The editor, known as Essjay, had described himself as a professor of religion at a private university.

But he was in fact Ryan Jordan, 24, a college student from Kentucky who used texts such as Catholicism for Dummies to help him work.

He has retired from the site and his authority to edit has been cancelled.

On the same topic, Nick Carr writes:

Of course, one thing that the Essjay scandal reveals is that credentials already play a strong role in Wikipedia's putatively anti-credentialist society. Essjay's great sin - the reason Wales [Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's co-founder and effective leader] ultimately sent him into exile - wasn't that he lied to the press but that he hoodwinked his fellow Wikipedians, that he used his fake credentials to get them to grant him deference in editing articles. In making his proposal to adopt a formal credentialing process, Wales is simply underscoring what is now obvious: at Wikipedia, credentials matter, whether genuine or fake.

Credentials enable us to invoke an external authority in order to establish our identity in the eyes of others. The Wikipedia community has been fudging the issue of credentials for some time now, because to admit that they matter is to beg the question "who are valid authorities in any given context?"

Wikipedia's editorial community is not, and cannot be, a collective identity solipsistically set apart from the rest of the world. However, by perpetuating a myth that it is, and that its reputation system is "emergent"—dependent on no more than the actions and interactions between Wikipedians, within Wikipedia—the Wikipedia community has been able to avoid squaring up to the "credential authority" issue until now.

It looks like it is an issue that is coming home to roost.

Wikipedia's split Identity

It's been a while since I've delved into Wikipedia's resources on identity. Truly, Wikipedians have made a rambling rabbit warren of the subject. A cursory browse from the Identity disambiguation page yields:

• Identity (philosophy)
• Identity (mathematics)
• Identity (social science)
• Psychological identity
• Personal identity (philosophy)
• Christian identity
  
• Cultural identity
• Gender identity
• Identity politics
• Identity and change
• Corporate identity
• Digital identity*
• Online identity

Hum, groping my way around this rickity taxonomy and thence through the rambling, insight-lite, citation-laden prose of many of the individual pages, I start to appreciate Nick Carr's point about the propensity of the Commons for mediocrity as never before .

Perhaps Identity Society could help to improve the situation over time by rolling up our collective editorial sleeves to bring some much-needed coherence and focus to Wikipedia's identity articles?

*I see that large chunks of my original "Digital identity" article remain, including the definition (in two parts—the first of which represented my own opinion, the second a somewhat reluctant nod to the consensus, circa autumn 2005, of the übergeek Identity Gang on the topic). Incidentally, I have come to believe that "digital identity" is an oxymoron: identity is in our heads and souls.

Cate 2.0

Grant McCracken reckons that Cate Blanchett is a good role model for companies, because (it is said that) she is:

• transformational and fluid
• open
• filled with contradiction
• uncontrolled at the core
• elusive
• ambiguous

Sounds like Ms Blanchett is a bit like Web 2.0, then. ; )

Double web whammy

Seamus paraphrases Tom Orlowski speaking at Wobble 2.0 last night:

web2.0 is fundamentally about "presentation layer people trying to solve infrastructure problems"—a fantastic insight that blew away much of the superficiality of the current rhetoric.

Later in the post he adds a pithy opinion of his own:

The web2.0 bubble is about businesses continuing to deny what web1991, TBL's [Tim Berners Lee's] original innovation, really means—the long-term unlikelihood of realising business-scale returns from digital.

Blimey, these guys don't pull their punches, do they?

Danah on "walled gardens"

Danah has penned a thought-provoking post on "walled gardens". The conclusion:

• If walls have value in meatspace, why are they inherently bad in mediated environments? I would argue that walls provide context and allow us to have some control over the distribution of our expressions. Walls should be appreciated, even if they are near impossible to construct.

• If robots can run around grabbing the content of supposed walled gardens, are they really walled? It seems to me that the tizzy around walled gardens fails to recognize that those most interested in caching the data (::cough:: Google) can do precisely that. And those most interested does not seem to include the content producers.

• If the walls come crashing down, what are we actually losing? Walls provide context, context is critical for individuals to properly express themselves in a socially appropriate way. I fear that our loss of walls is resulting in a very confused public space with far more visibility than anyone can actually handle.

Basically, i don't think that walled gardens are all that bad. I think that they actually provide a certain level of protection for those toiling in the mud. The problem is that i think that we've torn down the walls of the supposed walled gardens and replaced them with chain links or glass. Maybe even one-way glass. And i'm not sure that this is such a good thing. ::sigh::

Surely the trick (and challenge) is to be able to make our own walls, rather than have to accept others'? After all, the inherent fluidity of the web suits it for shadowing subjective, psychological realities (unique for each individual) far better than a shared, objective, physical one.