UPDATE: This week, the Times reported on a Facebook development effort that's in testing:
Facebook’s biggest asset — its population of more than 200 million users — is also part of its Achilles’ heel. As more people join and connect with more people they know, the chances grow that one’s embarrassing photographs from a night of carousing might be seen by the wrong person.
To help remedy this, the company is testing new controls that will allow members to specify which groups or individuals are able to see each text update, photo or video they post on the site. For example, the controls would make it easy for a user to remind all the family members on Facebook about a surprise birthday party, while excluding the birthday girl.
“Our overall philosophy is that people should be as open or as closed as they want to be,” said Chris Kelly, chief privacy officer for the company, in a conference call with reporters Wednesday to discuss the changes.
And now, for my original post, which I stand behind as a far easier way to release this to the masses, because it
Over the past few months, I've been a little more active with coworkers on Facebook. Some of this was precicipated by my Worlds Collide! post and cross-posting from a few weeks ago, but most is just the friendly back & forth that I used to have over cube walls, but now have online. And fairly publicly, but I'm fine with that. After all, I've had brianfending.com going strong for little under a decade now (which gets cross-posted to Twitter automatically); I use Twitter (which itself gets cross-posted to Facebook right away) several times a day; and respond to direct comments and inquiries via my blog, Facebook, and LinkediIn as I can. Everything new is just an extension of my original pattern of sharing, which is fairly centralized.
Regardless, that's a lot of layers to an online identity, and I didn't quite scratch the surface of other things that I use more passively or in a completely separate manner (like LinkedIn, which I mentioned). It's just one identity in syndication, though. I have one login per site, and when I syndicate from brianfending.com to twitter.com/fending to facebook.com/brianfending, it's all Me. But what if I had *two or more* such identities on any of these services? Further, what if I decided that my personal brand should *never* collide with my professional brand, branching my content into two or more streams? This is, after all, a lot like the days of multiple blogs for different audiences, a practice that still goes on today for a good reason: it works. [NOTE: I started a cult online (as Founding Father Fending) as a microcosmic (and funny, if I must say so myself) example, though others use multiple blogs for *really good* reasons. :)] Take for instance the example of a person who has four blogs:
- FamilyMatters: a momblog about parenting struggles and martinis,
- AwesomePhotoBlog: detailed travel photography posts,
- MadeThisLastNight!: cooking-centered content with pictures of every night's dinner, and
- theSuperSecretBlog: a password-protected personal journal
It's all about focusing on your audience and sometimes flatout protecting your content from ANY eyes. I get it! Go marketeers!
But what about an identity-based service like Facebook? After all, the shift in identity that Chris Messina discussed in his Drupalcon keynote is toward less ambiguity and a focus on open conversations between people, not activity between screennames, and with that comes this singular Identity. So when Michael Wentz and Brian Fending start going at it on Facebook, this isn't between "elDiabloDelQueso" and "theNerveToucher", it's between two people passionate about different stuff that sometimes intersects. Now here's the question: What if there WERE more Me's on Facebook?
- "Brian Fending", who posted status updates on beer/scotch/fatherhood/music and friended, well... his friends,
- "Brian Fending", who only posted about green building-related stuff and friended Greenies, and
- "Brian Fending", who only updated on technology and friended geeks
All of these would be completely different people from a data perspective, because Facebook was designed to be "one account per human". Technically speaking, the practice of multiple (or even fake-name) accounts is not allowed:
Maintaining multiple accounts,
regardless of the purpose, is a violation of Facebook’s Terms of Use.
If you already have a personal account, then we cannot allow you to
create business accounts for any reason. You can manage all the Pages
and Socials Ads that you create on your personal account.
...but people do it. A lot, I think. The argument for the practice of multiple Facebook accounts is very much the niche blogging argument: the better focused your content, the better marketshare you'll likely get and retain because you have a focused brand. Frankly, maybe you don't WANT professionals in your field reading about your personal life. (That sentiment resonates with me, too, but not enough for me to branch my content. For now, I believe the collection of my interests and passions to *be* my personal brand. But enough about me.)
Still, I argue that it's not the same - that when you "friend" someone on a trust-based network like Facebook, they are friending you as an individual. I rather like the Messina model of trust based networks and individual-based Identity over "screenname"-based or ambiguous identifiers. That ambiguity belies the inherent problem with this approach: having more than one *login* for a service means that, from a data perspective, you are more than one person.
The Proposed Solution: Personalities
Hear me out on this one. (And please, Facebook? Give me a footnote when you implement this. I know you guys are smart and all, but this is kind of a good one...) This model can apply to any trust-based network (Twitter, indenti.ca, Facebook, whatever), but requires a change to the core of each service. (One million engineers just said, "GAH!," and spit out their milk.)
When you create a Facebook account, you are but one person. Then you seek out Friends. Really simple stuff so far. Simplicity continues when you start to post content to your Wall, start to add Applications that interact with your Friends and post content to your Wall, and your Friends can see your content on their Walls, too. You read your Friends' content on *your* Wall and get invitations from them through *their* Applications... it's a little ecosystem. Nice and simple... until you want to share your content with discrete subsets of Friends. This is where a little step called Personalities comes in.
Your Personalities are separate aspects of your life, like "Work" and "School", or "Music" and "Work" and "Public" and "Private", or even "Family" and "Friends". (Heck, they could be the names you go by in each setting. Think Stripper here, people.) Basically, you'd be admitting to yourself, "I say different things to family, friends, coworkers, customers, and strangers. And I want to decide what things get read by each group in this setting, too." The closest analogy I have is tagging on blogs. I filed this post under four categories: "facebook, Personal, Technology, twitter". People interested in just my "music" category who subscribed to that RSS feed at my site wouldn't see this post in their RSS reader. This is the inverse, though: I'm deciding what to push, not what content people get to decide to pull.
Theoretically, you could decide these things at any time, and even change your mind moving forward about what content certain of your Friends get to see. If, for instance, you become very good friends with a coworker, you may want them to see how your home improvement projects are coming along instead of just what you're working on at work.
So the Facebook startup steps would now look like:
- Get your Facebook account, pick your vanity URL (e.g.: facebook.com/brianfending)
- Optionally: Establish your Personalities, picking which of them is your default ("public") personality, if you allow strangers to see your content at all
- Find your Friends, tagging each with the Personality or Personalities you wish to allow them to see
- Post your content, optionally restricting each piece of content (Wall post, picture, etc) by Personality... or posting by default to all Personalities... or posting it to multiple Personalities (you knew that one was coming)
It's an extra step (IF you want Personalities!) and has ramifications for Applications like the one I use to pump Twitter posts into Facebook, but it gets all of these people with multiple accounts the functionality they desire and, wouldn't you know it, gets people like me more likely to use *just* Facebook instead of Facebook and LinkedIn. It potentially turns Facebook into the hub for a very robust Identity Management framework.
So I'm watching the banned multiple account practice closely to see how it unfolds - it's the fifth such instance I've seen, and surely e pluribus unum. Maybe a denormalized Facebook is inevitable as it endures what Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang called Facebook's Awkward Adolescence, which is probably when Personalities become an appealing option for the core Facebook developers thrown in the path of the unmanageable masses. But one thing is for sure: I'm going to have a serious sitdown with myself (and the cult) if I find another Brian Fending friending me someday.
