Tag: identity

  • New media indeed

    When I wrote this in last week’s post – “‘social’ as it relates to friends and followers’ overrules ‘social’ as a relationship between brand and consumer”, in the context of how brands use social media, I also became  more conscious that despite me relating to Facebook and Twitter as a means to connect with friends, the platforms themselves were clearly seen as a media by the world at large. Even LinkedIn now apparently has a news aggregator.

    It is true that I consume large amounts of content via (or on) Facebook and Twitter, but I have always seen it as content shared by friends, not as media like a newspapers or TV channels. It is probably because I have always associated media with information and entertainment and never social. But that’s only a personalised view, I realise. The larger picture shows a content delivery platform – media. I guess when social scaled it didn’t know what else to do but become media. Interesting how the new media platforms worked from social connection towards utility and the old media are trying to make the journey from info and entertainment to social.

    And thus when I saw a few recent Facebook developments, I viewed it through the prism of FB as media. Facebook launched Sponsored Stories a while back, using friends’ actions as an ‘advertisement’. It updated Pages giving functionalities that helped brands interact more. Now it has completely knocked off the ‘Share’ button and replaced it with an omnipotent ‘Like’ button that will transmit a story blurb complete with thumbnail instead of the earlier single line in ‘Recent Activity’. (details) Publishers won’t complain since content will be more visible now. Facebook’s comment box plugin also got revamped with better moderation, social algorithms to surface the comments that will be most interesting to you (indicated by social signals from friends) and better distribution – now, when a user utilises the “Post to Facebook” button on a site with FB comments enabled, it can be replied to on FB and will automatically be reflected on the original website as well. If the publisher has a Page on FB, it can respond to the comment and include the people who have ‘Liked’ the page into the conversation. (details) That’s a first from FB – allowing conversations to go out. Wonder what they’re after – interest graph, a perpetually signed-in user, sole web identity provider, all of the above? But in essence, a new media platform that connects publishers with users. And in this age, brands are after all content creators too, eh?

    I would think the progression is obvious – first build a user base with awesome features, then focus on publishers  (including brands) who will make it a distribution channel, and the next step would be to make the advertisers spend more.

    While Google is busy dealing with content farms in search results, I realise that we have very little means to stay away from the Facebook way of throwing content at us. Watch your newsfeed as Facebook uses you and the content publisher to make itself more indispensable as a platform. Like I tweeted, the hope is that in trying to be everything – mailbox, location, photo storage, for everyone, Facebook might lose itself. The effect all this will have on ‘trust’ in networks, I’ll leave for another post.

    Media has always been aggregating audiences by providing information..+entertainment..+social connections… and then leasing it to brands. (advertisers) With advances in technology, it’s perhaps time for brands to create their own direct lines to consumers, outside of the new media barons. Otherwise, in their immediate comfort state of using yet another platform as media, the way they’re accustomed to, it is possible that they will continue to be at the mercy of a third party and have to play by their rules, sometimes at the risk of antagonising the end user.

    until next time, mediators = media + dictators? 😉

  • Id+entity

    There was this experiment suggested in ‘Tomorrow’s God‘ – to look in the mirror and stare into your eyes. If you concentrate and hold your gaze long enough you’ll begin to ‘step outside yourself’ and ironically, have a more objective view. Its a bit similar to some meditation techniques, I think, and though I read (and tried) this about 6-7 years back, I remember having thought of things (about myself) that don’t usually surface. But it does lead to a very interesting question – who are you? 🙂

    Is it the job you do or the designation you hold? Or do you define yourself by your nationality or religion? Or the perception you have created among your friends, family, extended family etc? Or a persona you have created among those who you deal with, only virtually? Or the things you consume and the thoughts that arise in your mind? The beliefs, the notions, the perceptions, the likes and dislikes that are created in you over time? The things you say and the things you do? The person you see in the mirror, the physical manifestation of you? All of these are transient, in varying degrees. Even nationality and religion because for me, they are notional. The fun part is, this ‘you’ is the way you see it, the moment you change the point of view, it all changes. So, who do you think you are?

    until next time, identify yourselves in the comments 😉

  • Online Segmenting and segregating

    We’ll start the thought from the easiest place. Facebook. 🙂 From industry leaders quitting Facebook to TC stating that media attacks on FB are getting out of hand, to Facebook deciding to launch ‘simplistic’ privacy options, there’s a ton of reading material out there. (I liked Danah Boyd’s ‘rant‘ quite a bit) But let’s get to the scope of the post, before i digress way out.

    I think it might be safe to assume  that we are different persons to different people. To the large set of siblings, friends, relatives, acquaintances and the various people we interact with, we share different aspects and versions of our personality, depending on the nature, time, depth, even expectations of our interactions and relationships. So, in a Facebook context too, we would like to retain different levels of sharing and communicating too, in spite of Mark Zuckerberg thinking that having two identities shows a lack of integrity. I think this might be the core of the current tussle – a failure to understand the need to segregate connections, and therefore the content that gets distributed to them.

    When i read Adam Singer’s take on Chris Brogan’s post, I was completely in agreement, because I think HE has nailed a universal truth about normalisation. The last part of the post also mentions how we write basis the kind of audience we’d like. That is a kind of content segregation too, and it is necessary now more than ever, because of content abundance.

    It’s not just to do with publishing, it is also to do with the kind of communities we become a part of. The net provides tools which allows us to aggregate  people like ourselves – basis interests, attitudes, beliefs, and if everything else fails, even location 😀  My point, there’s segregation all around.

    Which brings me to the usual suspect – brands. I started on this last week, and found myself thinking of it during the recent UTV Bindass scuffle. Now, if we go by UTV’s brand communication, its clearly a youth brand. I’ve realised that ‘Youth’ is a very flexible segmentation, and people my age might argue that its all in the mind etc, but it was interesting to see that the average age of opinion sharers was on the erm, riper side of 30. I wonder if the brand would want this audience segment as its viewers.

    It reminds me of the Facebook user’s need for segregation choices. While the net gives the brand tools to find users in a desired segment/demographic, and the brand can limit itself to engaging them specifically, there really is no way to prevent interactions coming from/happening outside the segment. In an earlier era, it was easy, because it was mostly one way communication. Now, what does a brand do if its dragged into a conversation? The non-open options (protected tweets, invite-only community etc) are not really great. Now some would say that this thought approach is close to advocating control for brands – which is a strict no-no as per the tenets of social media 🙂 – but I can’t help but think of the choice that the brand might want in terms of the discussions they want to be part of.  In a case like Bindass, will “Thank you for the feedback, but we all know that different audience sets have different needs and likes. Hope to have some programming that you’ll like, soon.” really cut it?

    In Facebook’s case, while i can perhaps understand Zuckerberg’s version of how radical transparency will make us all better, I’ll still make a case for it to be a user’s choice, unhindered by beguiling ToS and changes to it. Similarly, in a scenario in which mobs and brand-baiting are rapidly on the rise, I’d say there should be a freedom of choice for brands too. How brands use it is a different discussion altogether.

    until next time, the answer, my friend, is flowin in the stream 🙂

    PS: Noted that Hippo, which is doing some excellent work on Twitter, replied to Tony’s Hippo-crates wordplay, (reply) but ignored the (same) one which i’d tweeted a couple of days earlier. (btw, he usually beats me to most wordplay stuff and more importantly, gives credit to original tweets when he doesn’t) Anyway, smart segmentation, Hippo knows i almost never snack.

    PPS: Its got nothing to do with the fact that Tony is almost a decade younger, okay? 😉

  • Connecting people

    It might be time for Nokia to rethink that line, thanks to the following recent launches- Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect, both of which offer data portability across sites which have implemented the services. It got me thinking about online identities. Before we get to that, a bit of introduction.

    Facebook Connect, when implemented on a website allows any user to log in using their Facebook credentials and use that identity to comment etc, and also transmits these activities back to Facebook. FB seems to have focused on popular web services like Digg, Hulu, among others, and a couple of entities that got me interested in the deal – Disqus (soon) and Twitter. It perhaps hopes to use their massive user base, to popularise itself. On the other hand, Google  seems to be have the average blogger in mind, and has tied up with Yahoo, AIM, Open Id and now Twitter to have a common login across websites that have implemented Google Friend Connect. A good comparison can be found here.

    As a blogger, Facebook Connect seems to be a more difficult thing to set up, but implementation in individual blogs will be helped by the plugins (esp on WordPress). I’m wondering whether FB will try to seed this service through the Blog Networks app that’s quite popular there. FB Connect does offer great advantages thanks to the social connect that is brought about by the usage details being transmitted back to Facebook.   So if I had installed FB Connect on this site, and you had used your FB id to login and comment, the fact that you’d commented would be shown on your newsfeed on FB, thereby giving that extra exposure to this site. Although Facebook assures data security and privacy, it does seem a little like opening your FB account to the world, since a lot of profile details will get displayed when you use the FB Connect service. The other question I have is whether these activities become the property of Facebook by virtue of appearing in the newsfeed? (I remember the old controversy on ownership of content uploaded on FB)

    Google Friend Connect seems to be quite easy to set up, and in that sense makes it simpler for a regular blogger to adopt it. The snag is that inspite of the Invite option, I don’t get much additional exposure since the usage information doesn’t get reflected anywhere (not even Orkut). I wonder if Google will have a one click installation of the service in the next version of Blogger. I am also thinking about where Ad Sense will be made to fit into all this.

    And now to the identity part. I blog as manuscrypts, a handle that I have used for more than 5.5 years now. For most of those years, the real me could only be pieced together from various posts I’d written. With the increasing usage of social/business networking services like Facebook and LinkedIn, my real world identity is not exactly a secret now. If i choose to comment on any blog using FB/Google Friend Connect, it has to be using the ‘real identity’, unless I create profiles only for my virtual self. 🙂

    On one hand, a portable identity across the web, and the advantages it offers are tempting, on the other hand I’m not sure whether I want all these networks to be talking to each other – when I comment on a social media site, I wouldn’t want the other users of the site to see my tagged photos on FB.  So far, I’d controlled what information about me goes to a contact, depending on his/her relationship with me. Different amounts of data for different levels of friendship. Yes, my profile is open on FB, but I don’t advertise it outside. That will not be the case if I use FB Connect. More importantly, I don’t want an entity like Google (which invokes paranoia in me) to know everything about me. The sad part is that I dont think an increase in transparency will improve personal integrity, tolerance etc, but that’s a different debate altogether.

    Me? I’ll wait a while before I encourage the use of either service on this site, who knows, maybe a LinkedIn Connect might come about. For now, let me try this app, that adds a twitter identity to my commenting system. 🙂

    until next time, connect 🙂

  • Password…protected?

    I sometimes end up passively watching ‘Moment of Truth’ – passively because it plays in the background while I’m surfing on the web. In the beginning I used to have a healthy disrespect for not just those who indulged in spilling out details of their life (mostly of the skeletal variety found in cupboards) but those whose voyeuristic inclinations made them watch it intensely.

    But now, it has also made me wonder about the almost cyclical nature of transparency. Wasn’t there a state when everyone knew everything about everyone else? Or, rather, one protoplasmic entity with a single consciousness? And then it evolved slowly until everyone had secrets. And now we have people willing to reveal their secrets for money. Of course, it doesn’t take us back to the original level, but still…

    In a comparable context, sometime back, there was also an interesting discussion on twitter, on privacy issues on the web, and people getting to know passwords. Like i said there, I’d classify these password hunters into basically two types – one for whom your identity is just another information source – banking passwords, credit card details etc, this guy wouldn’t be interested in  say, your clandestine relationships; two would be the guy who knows you personally and would like to really like to find something personal about you via your virtual life.

    Do we fear the second kind more than the first kind? Because he will break the persona that we have built over the years, in front of others, show them what we are beneath the veneer, and more importantly force us to face ourselves? Isn’t that the reason we are so jittery about privacy. It can’t be just the fear that he might use our accounts for something bad. When I look at it objectively, personal accounts (mail, blogging, social networks etc) are just data- data that we might choose not to share, what we call personal data. But what exactly do we mean by personal? Isn’t it just something, that if told to someone else would shame us to some extent? Isn’t that what we are trying to protect? Or am I missing something? What really is privacy?

    I really wonder if these privacy issues will somehow (in the long run) force us to have characters that are more spotless, a sort of utopian existence, when people are so transparent to each other, that there will be no reason or room for secrets? I think it’s possible, you?

    until next time, translucent lives