Multiple Personalities - A possible solution to multiple social media accounts

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:

  1. FamilyMatters: a momblog about parenting struggles and martinis,
  2. AwesomePhotoBlog: detailed travel photography posts,
  3. MadeThisLastNight!: cooking-centered content with pictures of every night's dinner, and
  4. 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?

  1. "Brian Fending", who posted status updates on beer/scotch/fatherhood/music and friended, well... his friends,
  2. "Brian Fending", who only posted about green building-related stuff and friended Greenies, and
  3. "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:

  1. Get your Facebook account, pick your vanity URL (e.g.: facebook.com/brianfending)
  2. Optionally: Establish your Personalities, picking which of them is your default ("public") personality, if you allow strangers to see your content at all
  3. Find your Friends, tagging each with the Personality or Personalities you wish to allow them to see
  4. 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.

I think he looks like me

Rachel's somewhere between 29 and 3,000 weeks along now, depending on who you ask. A sonogram from early this week try to answer a critical question:

Q. Will he play college basketball?

A. Quite possibly. Quiiiiite possibly.

Baby Boy Fending

 

Best Social Media Redux Ever

So I follow a bunch of people on twitter, and occasionally I find a nugget so stellar that all of those tweets about what so&so is having for lunch or what airport security line is faster today are transformed into a worthwhile investment of my eyeball time (tm). One of the most valuable (more signal than noise) twitterers I follow is RedMonk analyst James Governor (@monkchips), who recently posted this reference to a very insightful blog post. Actually, he was relaying something that @discredittech had posted, which was a retweet of an excerpt of said blogpost from @higgis, who I don't follow because he tends to have a lot of open conversations in his twitter feed. Long backstory, I know, but it highlights why I use twitter as I do and limit the number of people that I follow.

Anyway, Web 2.0/Social Media: Really guys, it's pretty simple is one of the funniest posts on the subject and simultaneously contains the most salient points on social media I've read. Author John Welch is, no doubt, probably a pretty angry guy. Just saying. But here are a couple of excerpts if you aren't yet convinced that you should read his whole post:

"Social Media is people talking to each other"

That's really all it is. You can put all the fucking spin, weasel words, and supercaptaincoolguy terminology you want, but it's like painting a diamond. In the end, what's inside is far more valuable than the coating.

All this shit, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, DoucheBlog, all of it, is just people talking to each other, in a fairly direct way. It's analgous to a telephone. You don't really think much about the phone system, it's only there to allow you to talk to someone far away. Same thing for online shit. It can be a one to one, one to many, many to one, many to many, or all of the above, but it's just people talking to each other.

If you make it more complicated than that as a concept, stop. You're about to go off the cliff into New Media Douchebaggery, and you don't want that. Ever.

Interjecting here: I've met a lot of douchebags. He's right. And:

When you're talking about monologues, like traditional media, coupons, fliers, television commercials, what have you, you can easily manage the message. You're the only source. It's easy. However, when everything becomes a dialogue, you can't do it, and if you try, you'll look like a pack of asses. Only stupider.

So what do you do when you're faced with someone who is ranting and raving, probably in an obscene fashion about your product or company? Talk To Them

Pretty angry for the rest of the post; absolutely spot on throughout. Sure, there are principles to adhere to for all the combinations of one->many, many->many, etc, but no matter what a constant loop of conversation is the most valuable thing, and many social media strategists altogether lose on that point.

Thing is, I don't think I can clean this up enough to distribute it at work - it would lose impact like a cleaned up Die Hard airing on TNT. Luckily, we're not engaging in much douchebaggery. But oh... I've got this great blogpost to circulate if we go that way. (And if said douchebaggery makes me as angry as this guy.)

The Conversation Prism

I stumbled across this beautiful technographic today. It captures pretty beautifully the complex ring of online services that surround content and the roles they play within various goals, interactions, and activities that surround any online brand. Some of the placement seems arbitrary, some most interesting in a context of continuous improvement. It's a big universe and none of it exists within a brand's direct control, though we can participate in the conversation. Selectively. :)

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The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas

LEEDuser.com released

So for the last several months, I've been head-down in a large BuildingGreen project called LEEDuser. For those of you in the know about LEED, skip a paragraph or two...

According to its creators at the United States Green Building Council (USGBC):

The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System™ encourages and accelerates global adoption of sustainable green building and development practices through the creation and implementation of universally understood and accepted tools and performance criteria.

To translate: LEED is a points-based system (attained through various "credits") wherein you document your process and success with a new or existing building and you get a little more than karma out of it - you get an energy-efficient building that will provide a return on investment. But the submission process can be complex and involved. It's just the nature of the beast: a lot of data, a lot of details (and people) to track down.

LEEDuserEnter LEEDuser (welcome back, learned people!):

So there is a vacuum of solid advice when it comes to LEED certification, mostly filled by third-party consultants. Expensive ones, sometimes. (Come on! You know it's true!) But they have great advice about when & how to do certain things, what credits are slamdunks in certain situations, and which ones to avoid (or at least be careful about) because they can be real money pits without the proper preparation and execution. This vacuum is also where LEEDuser comes in.

We partnered with YRG Sustainability Consultants, a global-reach LEED consultancy, for a slew of the content, exercised our editorial muscles around creating a solid peer-to-peer voice throughout, and stretched Drupal in wonderful ways to meet our goals. Now, all of the sexiness didn't fall from the sky or pop out of the drupal installation - we had some very gifted design folks help us imagine (and reimagine!) the front-end features and a couple of contract developers worked on theming it up for Drupal. Then we continued to massage it - in fact, we're still working on this beta-release product.

In all, it does a great job playing the role of highly paid consultant: tips to get you on the right track with picking compliance paths, Getting It Done action items for your team, even a Documentation Toolkit to walk you through the worst of that preparation. Per Credit. In a bunch of rating systems. It's INSANE how good this is at delivering the required content. Try doing this by reading twenty blogs a day for a year... Having it in one place, with the official USGBC credit language right there on the screen for your reference? Impossibly awesome and without a single peer in this and many regards.

Oh, and we walk you through Strategies you can implement to get your credits, show Project Lessons (case studies) in context, show Related Products (a "best of") to get you pointed to the right products & manufacturers... The list is kind of long. Just get a login.

Getting technical: The codebase - excepting the theme, of course - is very, very low on custom code. "So you had to work less on code? Why do you think ANYBODY cares??" Well, yeah... But ask any application management professional what's better to support: Custom/In-House or Delivered+Configured Apps. While a Drupal instance may be somewhere in between, this particular property is toward the Delivered+Configured side of the equation. Fewer things that move around and break on update, hopefully, because the development was mostly vetted by a community of developers, versus "a roomful of smart guys." Don't get me wrong: I love rooms full of smart guys. But I'll take the big swelling mess of smarter guys any day.

So that's it. Insane hours at times. Crazy awesome ajax callbacks across the board. Drupal (taxonomies in particular) pushed to the max to tie stuff together. A real focus on what content is important and then it's {poof} delivered. I just could not be happier with the result, and know that we are creating a greener, more sustainable world in the process.

Note: Most of this is, of course, the opinion of a guy who spend months immersed in organizing information and configuring a content management system around it. You should probably ask a LEED AP (the dudes who know that credit language like a Baptist preacher knows Luke) for real-world examples and validation. Remember: when in doubt, ask an expert... or register at LEEDuser.com. :)