When Mixel — an iPad-based collage app — launched last November, one of its features quickly caused frustration: Its requirement that users log in with Facebook before they could start creating and sharing art.
The reason for that requirement, Mixel co-founder (and former NYTimes.com design director) Khoi Vinh explained, was real names. Vinh wanted to build the Mixel community around real names, not anonymity or pseudonyms. "We think this is essential to the kind of experience we're building: a family-friendly environment that's suitable for just about anyone," he wrote.
At the time, Facebook was pretty much his only option. But that is starting to change. And as proving your online identity becomes more important, it's a valuable race for the players involved to win.
Along with Sunday morning's secrets, PostSecret founder Frank Warren announced that the $2 PostSecret iPhone app is now closed. Warren received complaints from users, Apple and the FBI about bad content on the anonymous art app. He says that users, moderators and his own family were threatened, citing two specific incidents he can't discuss further. Launching the app now displays only one secret announcing the closing.
Whereas submissions to the PostSecret blog are curated by hand, the app was an experiment allowing any iPhone user to generate secrets instantly and anonymously. Warren says that users shared over 2 million secrets, and that "99%" of them "were in the spirit of PostSecret." The app launched in September, becoming the best-selling app in the U.S. and Canada overnight. It is now gone from the iTunes store, the Android version never arrived, and the PostSecret App website no longer loads.
Facebook made significant changes to how it delivers your friends' news and updates today by releasing a ticker feature and a news feed format that arranges missed updates in a newspaper-style format.
The move is an improvement in relevancy of information feeds in social profiles and it demonstrates an intelligent system for delivering information and encouraging interaction on the world's largest social network.
PostSecret, the beloved weekly blog that allows anyone to anonymously share a postcard containing a personal secret, has launched an iPhone app that expands the project out onto the social and mobile Web. In addition to viewing the regular Sunday Secrets - the physical postcards - featured on PostSecret.com, users can create and share digital secrets and browse them by time and location.
The idea of broadcasting your darkest secrets across the Internet might sound counter-intuitive, but the app does an amazing job of reassuring users of their privacy and security. Not only has PostSecret built a heartfelt, loving application, it has raised the privacy bar for app developers everywhere.
On Monday, 34 American Civil Liberties Union affiliates across the U.S. sent 379 records requests to local law enforcement agencies seeking to know when, how and why they are using cellphone location data to track American citizens. The ACLU wants to know if law enforcement is going over the heads of the U.S. court system to use what should be private information against American citizens. How big of a concern is this for the average American?
The ACLU wants to know how law enforcement obtains and uses location data from cellphones. Are they contacting the cellular operators directly? Are they issuing warrants to the operators? If so, is the person who owns the location data aware of the warrant? The implications are far reaching. Law enforcement's access to location data affects law-abiding private citizens, not just those involved in criminal activities.
Online reputation has been measured by in-bound links through Google Ranking, RSS and feed subscribers and now, the number of social media shares on services like Klout and Echo apps. As new reputation systems have emerged, an army of deceptive users have risen up to game them via link farms and exchanges, fake profile generators and most recently, Twitterbots.
It's no question that social media reputation has become the influencer metric du jour, but we've yet to see an all encompassing platform that isn't gameable. Social stock market site Empire Avenue is certainly no exception.
As the creator of one of the Internet's most base, vile and creative websites, 4chan founder Chris Poole knows a little bit about the effects of user identity on user behavior. 4chan, a completely anonymous, real-time message forum, is the birthplace of many an Internet meme and user identity, or the lack thereof, can play a big part in this.
Poole spoke about the collaborative, creative process today in his keynote address at SXSW in Austin, Texas, spending some time on the topic of identity and authenticity. In this horserace, Poole unsurprisingly comes out on the side of anonymity.
Last week, a new toolbar began appearing on Google for user and some took it as evidence of the ever-elusive "Google +1" or "Google Me" social network. Today, Google explained the appearance of this part of the bar as a simple method for users to keep track of what identity they're using as they browse online and use Google services.
In a blog post entitled "The freedom to be who you want to be..." the company explains that the toolbar help ensure users "know exactly what mode they're in when using Google's services."
Over the last year, Facebook has become increasingly dominant in terms of being used as the user identity and login on third-party sites. Last summer, we reported that Facebook had dominated as the third-party login of choice, surpassing sites like Twitter, Google and Yahoo in all realms but one - news. News sites saw users logging in almost twice as often using Twitter.
Now, it looks like another site is gaining ground in another realm. Career-centric social network LinkedIn is growing as the login of choice for business-to-business (B2B) sites, proving once again that users prefer certain identities for certain online activities.
Facebook today unveiled an incredibly simple new service that will allow any website owner to hand over user registration for their site to Facebook, undoubtedly something countless independent sites have considered since seeing the disaster that resulted from the hacking of Gawker's user account info earlier this month.
The new tool, called simply Registration Tool, is both simpler and more powerful than Facebook Connect. It works as a pre-populated iFrame for logged-in Facebook users, allows site owners to ask for fields of information not offered by Facebook and can be used to register people who do not have Facebook accounts. All under the watchful eye of Facebook, a company that leads the world in online identity and specializes in user data security. It's a very smart move, but raises questions about the company's growing power.
