Over the weekend, Microsoft used its @BuildWindows8 account to send a message to the account owner, saying "@StevenSinofsky please see guidelines on parody and impersonation. Your account is not following them them and has been reported."

Unlike Facebook, Twitter allows users to post under pseudonyms, which has led to high-profile spoof accounts for tech celebrities, including now fewer than half a dozen for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. But rarely has a prankster gone as deep-down the corporate food chain to parody an executive that few outside of diehard Windows geeks would know by name.

And while many of the accounts are harmless, Microsoft had reason for concern: the person or persons behind the hoax were using the fake Sinofsky Twitter account to answer questions from customers and journalists. The bio on the account did have a clear-cut disclaimer (""I'm all about Windows 8 right now. And having a laugh. Oh, I'm not 'the' Steven Sinofsky by the way. He's got a little project to focus on for now") but that wasn;t enough to tip some people off to the satire.

Neither Twitter or Microsoft have responded to a request for comment, but we'll update the post if they do.

The central thing wrong with the social Web is that users don't own their identities. Users share themselves with identity services - like Facebook and Google - that then act as representatives of the people using them. Facebook and Google allow other sites to rent those identities. But when you log in to a new service using Facebook Connect, you are actually constraining your identity to the Facebook version of it, though you're expanding Facebook itself. Do you want to be the same version of yourself everywhere else as you are on Facebook? Or Google?

By doing things this way, Facebook, Google et al. can lend your name to things without really asking you, like ads and promotions of various kinds. You have implied your permission by "liking" things or "checking in" to places.

But you didn't create the ad. You just initiated an action that triggered it. Social applications that speak for us this way are using our identities without us.

Identity Is Prismatic

Our Facebook and Google identities are like constellations. The stars are our actions on the Web. Facebook and Google are on the ground, staring up at the sky with a bunch of marketers and advertisers. They're the know-it-alls pointing at abstract shapes and confidently labeling them with names.

But the actual user, not the vague constellation of her online actions, is a multi-faceted person. "Identity is prismatic," as Chris Poole says, and "Facebook and Google do identity wrong."

"It's not 'who you share with,' it's 'who you share as,'" Poole says. In other words, we're only presenting one, Facebook-facing aspect of ourselves when we share online via Facebook. The advertisers who make Facebook possible don't have a full picture; they have a Facebook caricature.

Today's Social Web Is a Performance

The more about ourselves we share with Facebook, the more stars you can see in the night sky, the clearer the constellation appears. Hence, Facebook rolls out Timeline and asks us to share our entire life story.

But what Facebook has to acknowledge is that this is still a performance. It's a make-believe Facebook self. And Facebook's (and Google's) business consists of spinning that self on our behalf, mapping it and stereotyping it and selling it.

It's not wrong of Facebook or Google to do that, per se. But I have a feeling that better products, better ads, and a better Web would be possible if users owned their identities, showing as many (or as few) facets as they want to show.

A Proposal: Online Identity as a Fingerprint

Users should have signatures that are truly theirs, instead of their Facebook and Google guardians signing on their behalf.

Identity on the Internet should be embedded by the user like a fingerprint. It should be written into the digital material we make using hardware we have authorized. We should also be able to withhold it whenever we choose and make the content anonymous.

We should also be able to sign multiple and pseudonymous identities, but we'll have to hash that out later, as a political issue, once this is even technically possible. The first step is to create a protocol that lets us sign off the bits we've written as being of us, so that they remain identifiable no matter where the content is repackaged or republished.

Why Do We Want This?

We want this because it would delineate a difference between something we made or we said and something an outside service extrapolated about us.

We want this because it would simplify problems of attribution and copyright on the Web. If we didn't sign something we created, it would default to the other ways we deal with unsigned content. But content that is signed would have an unmistakable origin.

Facebook and Google can only make enough money from their profiles of us by tracking our activity and extrapolating who we are and what we do. But that would still be possible on top of a layer of authentic identity that those services didn't own. They would be able to compete based on whose recommendations were more accurate, but there would be a layer of protection between who we declare we are and who companies assume we are. We would no longer be tied to just one of those identity constellations.

OpenID is not what I'm talking about, either. It's more than just logging in to websites. This is something we write in. It's not a handle and a password. It's like one of those wax seals on a letter, except with Information Age security measures.

The Naïve Things About My Idea

Many things about my above proposal are naïve. Here are just a few:

1. I am not well-versed enough in the longstanding projects of this nature that already exist, like GnuPG signing or Mozilla's BrowserID, to know what the challenges are. But I'm working on it.
   
2. I haven't specified at which layer of the user interface this identity signature should take place, whether at the device level, the browser level, or what. Again, that's because I am not well-versed enough in the technical requirements of such a project.
   
3. And yes, the inertia of moving away from siloed Web identities (Google/Facebook) towards this is unconscionably humongous.

So I know there are experts on these problems out there. Talk to me. What's right and what's wrong about this idea? Who's working on it? How is it going? Is it impossible? Is it unnecessary? Is it hopeless? In the interest of a better Web, let's talk about this.

See also: Scott M. Fulton, III's year-end post, "Issues for 2012 #3: Who Gets to Define Your Online Identity?"

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

I've been considering paring down for some time, not because I think my connections aren't cool, but because I'm missing out on things like my family's birthday notifications and friends' graduations. Not long ago I found out that one of my best friends had a son who was having brain surgery. Apparently he'd had a condition for some time, but I'd never seen her mention it because I have too many connections.

How Many Facebook Friends Do You Have? Are You Planning to Cut Back?

We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and presented them back to you with Storify. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

Sometimes it's difficult to catch everything that hits tech media in a day, so we wrap up some of the most talked about stories. We give you a daily recap of what you missed in the ReadWriteWeb Community, including a link to some of the most popular discussions in our offsite communities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ as well.

Now is the Time to Quit Facebook

Did you know there is a movement supporting those who have chosen to quit Facebook? Alicia Eler found that the movement is a great place to discover the stories of those who have left the social behemoth, and maybe buy a t-shirt to celebrate your Facebook abstinence as well.

More Must Read Stories:

Is the Digital Music Revolution Really Ruining Sound Quality?

It seems like every advance in digital music brings with it a debate about whether the latest format degrades quality in exchange for convenience. This was true when CDs first came onto the scene, and it's probably even more true today with MP3s and their digital audio brethren. Heck, even the advent of the gramophone in 1889 sparked debates over whether its sound quality was worse than Thomas Edison's phonograph. (more)

Microsoft Defines the New Mobile Business Experience on iPad

In 1984 and for a few years thereafter, Microsoft got its hands dirty in graphical computing by producing a few surprisingly mediocre applications for Macintosh, starting with a port of its otherwise decent spreadsheet called Multiplan. By the time Windows 3.0 was released in 1990, many of us felt the company would never again premiere a software concept on a machine bearing an Apple logo. (more)

The Most Social Super Bowl Breaks Records, Offers Advertisers Lessons

Twitter did not crash and the Super Bowl became the most tweeted sporting event in history, averaging more than 10,000 tweets per second.

That wasn't all that surprising: continued growth of the social network, not to mention tablet and smartphone technology that make it easier to tweet while watching television, means that record will probably be broken several times between now and next year's Super Bowl. (more)

Google Begins Building 1-Gigabit Internet Service in Kansas City

Google breaks ground today on the super-fast fiber optic network it plans to build for the lucky residents of Kansas City, Kan. They'll get a 1 gigabit-per-second Internet connection, which will offer downloads 100 times faster than what most Americans get. Uploads will be a thousand times faster than average. (more)

Since 2009, Mobile Internet Usage Has Doubled Every Year

The growth of the mobile Web is on a steady rise. While pundits throw around words like "explosive" and "outrageous" the more precise word is probably "consistent." According to analytics firm StatCounter, users accessing the Web through mobile devices has almost doubled every year since 2009. In its latest report, StatCounter says that global Internet usage through mobile devices rose to 8.5%, nearly doubling the 2011 figure of 4.3%. (more)

The Online Ad Fails at the Super Bowl

While most of us know the results of yesterday's Big Game, the results of the online ad campaigns from the dozens of companies spending multiple millions are less clear. Fortunately, monitoring firm Yottaa is here to lead the way and let us know who scored and who missed serving up online content to complement their TV spots. (more)

Believe It Or Not, There's An Upside To Diminished Online Privacy

Sunday's New York Times was a Luddite's dream. Tthe paper's Sunday Review section had three lengthy opinion pieces dedicated to "Life Under Digital Dominance" (their words, not mine), including Evgeny Morozov's lengthy treatise that social media will kill originality because we're all too afraid to publicly "like" something on Facebook that our friends don't like, a plea to adopt European-style rules to keep data private and a particularly threatening piece by Lori Andrews promising sudden cuts in our personal credit lines and troubles obtaining insurance because Facebook is using us. (more)

Twitter Could Go Public In 2013, But Why Bother?

If last week's highly-anticipated Facebook IPO was too much excitement, not to mention too many numbers packed into a dense, 197-page S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, breathe easy: it does not appear as if Twitter has any short-term plans to follow suit and become the last of the big three social networks to trade as a public company. (more)

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It seems that everyone has an opinion about Facebook's stated goal of being a force for good in the world. Feminists online have also raised questions about the company's unusually exclusive all-male Board of Directors and about mega-powerful COO Sheryl Sandberg's public calls for women to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. As a cultural phenomenon of historic proportion, what does the Facebook IPO mean with regard to gender?

The all-male board of Facebook makes you wonder why a company serving a user base of at least 50% half women has no female representation on the board. We told ourselves that women board directors can build value and bring win-win strategies to the table - let's #changetheratio here.

Bloomberg's Carol Hymowitz contrasts the all male membership of the board with Facebook's avowed social mission to empower the world and to Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg's powerful advocacy for women.

Facebook generally declines to comment on issues like this. It's typical of Silicon Valley's libertarian-leaning culture to believe that the best way to overcome injustices connected to gender, race, class and sexual orientation, are to ignore the existence of gender, race, class and sexual orientation. That approach may leave unresolved long-standing institutional, economic and cultural factors that stand in the way of equal opportunity and which cannot be overcome by society as a whole through the self interest and sheer force of will of people on the margins of power.

Sheryl Sandberg is the second most visible person at Facebook and will likely become a billionaire in the IPO. She's often said to be a prominent advocate of women in the workplace.

Doug Barry points out on Jezebel, though, that Sandberg's position is a very particular one: that women are fundamentally responsible for their own career development in corporate America and need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

Sandberg is well known for her 2010 TED talk Why we have too few women leaders, which has been viewed more than 1 million times.

Sandberg's message is directed at the elite crowd gathered at TED and adresses women who are not gaining top power positions in the organizations they work at. She offers three primary pieces of advice. "One, sit at the table," by which she means give yourself the credit you deserve and aim high. "Two, make your partner a real partner," or make sure that heterosexual married couples contain parents with equal earning power and responsibility and that men are encouraged to take responsibility around the house. "And three, don't leave before you leave," in other words keep seizing new opportunities despite the possibility you might take time off to have a child.

Those are relatively conservative political admonitions that speak primarily to the problems experienced by the women in society who are already closest to power.

Barry writes on Jezebel:

Not only is Sandberg exceptionally smart, but, after graduating from Harvard Business School, she landed a job at the World Bank as the chief of staff first for Larry H. Summers then the Treasury Secretary. A job at Google followed before she joined Facebook in 2008, an opportunity that Sandberg was prescient enough to take full advantage of. If success really is preparation meeting opportunity, Sandberg was more than prepared for her chance at professional success, but some women believe that when she insists on aiming high, she's discounting the fact that her meteoric rise owes itself, at least in part, to some very favorable circumstances (including the fact that her husband, Daniel Goldberg, is a successful entrepreneur in his own right and the couple doesn't have to worry about finding child care for their two sons).

Barry quotes Sylvia Ann Hewlett, president of the Center for Talent Innovation and director for the Gender and Policy Program at Columbia University:

I'm a huge fan of her accomplishments and think she's a huge role model in some ways, but I think she's overly critical of women because she's almost implying that they don't have the juice, the chutzpah, to go for it...I think she's had a golden path herself, and perhaps does not more readily understand that the real struggles are not having children or ambition. Women are, in fact, fierce in their ambition, but they find that they're actually derailed by other things, like they don't have a sponsor in their life that helps them go for it.

That paragraph had a soft ending; there are far more unpleasant ways that many women are derailed than by a lack of a sponsor at work.

Courteney Martin, on one of the web's most respected feminist blogs, Feministing, says that while Sandberg's message to individual women is valuable, it is just one story.

In essence, her message is tantamount to The American Dream for the 21st century woman: the problem is not sexism or racism or classism, the problem is not pathetic work-family policy at the federal level, the problem is not collective. The problem is you. In the Gospel of Sandberg, individual women must find partners who will share the load and negotiate fiercely, overcome their own guilt about not being able to be fully present parents, and "lean in" to their careers despite the lack of structural or systemic supports that might make that feel even slightly safe or rewarding.

Reading this profile of Sandberg, I was reminded of Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's, incredible TED Talk, in which she talks about "the danger of the single story." She explains, "The single story creates stereotypes. And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story."

I actually think that Sandberg is smart and has great intentions with her message that women need to dig deep and stick to their own dreams. I agree with her in many ways... This is part of the story. But it's not the whole story.

The rest of the story is better told by women who didn't grow up with lots of familial and social support, women who didn't go to Harvard, women who weren't mentored by Larry Summers, women with different definitions of success and leadership.

To look at the bright side, perhaps Facebook's social technology will itself help other women tell their stories and hear the stories of women other than the most privileged elite.

The world's largest communication network between people is taking a big financial step, it's infamously opportunistic with changing ideas of privacy and it's lead by an all-male board and a woman whose perspective on gender is likely applauded by conservatives around the world. That all seems important to discuss.

"Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission - to make the world more open and connected.

We think it's important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us, how we make decisions and why we do the things we do. I will try to outline our approach in this letter.

Today, our society has reached another tipping point. We live at a moment when the majority of people in the world have access to the internet or mobile phones - the raw tools necessary to start sharing what they're thinking, feeling and doing with whomever they want. Facebook aspires to build the services that give people the power to share and help them once again transform many of our core institutions and industries.

There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.

We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other.

Even if our mission sounds big, it starts small - with the relationship between two people.

Personal relationships are the fundamental unit of our society. Relationships are how we discover new ideas, understand our world and ultimately derive long-term happiness.

At Facebook, we build tools to help people connect with the people they want and share what they want, and by doing this we are extending people's capacity to build and maintain relationships.

People sharing more - even if just with their close friends or families - creates a more open culture and leads to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others. We believe that this creates a greater number of stronger relationships between people, and that it helps people get exposed to a greater number of diverse perspectives.

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world's information infrastructure should resemble the social graph - a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.

We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

We hope to improve how people connect to businesses and the economy.

We think a more open and connected world will help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services.

As people share more, they have access to more opinions from the people they trust about the products and services they use. This makes it easier to discover the best products and improve the quality and efficiency of their lives."

Photo by Silverisdead

Facebook is expected to go public under the symbol "FB," but it's unclear whether they will list on the NYSE or the NASDAQ. With $3.8 billion in ad revenues in 2011, Facebook is on a roll. But what does that mean to the typical Facebook user?

What Does the Facebook IPO Mean To You?

We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and presented them back to you with Storify. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

Emil Protalinski has a much more thorough analysis of what is happening, which includes the Pew Research report AP used, as well as a July 2011 Pew report that focused solely on teens and social media use. His conclusion? Teens are definitely using Twitter more, but they are not giving up their Facebook accounts to do so.

The AP report seemed aimed at the myth that younger users found Twitter "uncool" and less protective of their privacy. AP draws some solid conclusions on why teens may be using Twitter more than they once did: unlike Facebook, Twitter allows them to set up multiple accounts and they can do so anonymously. There's also rising evidence that teens like to use Twitter with a smaller, select group of friends while keeping Facebook as a more public profile for a wider group of friends and family members.

But score a big swing-and-a-miss for the assertion that teens are "shifting to Twitter" included in the AP report. Like a lot of us, teens, including at least one of the two teens AP quoted in its story, maintain multiple social media accounts on multiple social media platforms.

Anecdotally, I can't speak for teens, but as a part-time college writing and journalism instructor, I can say Twitter has been the best crossover platform for me when it comes to connecting with students in their late teens and early twenties. There's a growing body of evidence suggesting that social media in the classroom can increase student engagement, so I've been experimenting with different ways to do just that over the course of the past year.

For many students and faculty, there remains a creep factor for friending on Facebook. I also know of a handful of students who have been in abusive relationships and have either been advised to shut down their Facebook accounts or limit the number of friends they have while amping up their privacy settings.

I tried using Google+ in one of my classes last fall but ran into problems when a couple of 17-year-old freshmen couldn't register for the site (Google has since changed the policy and opened Google+ up to teens). Google+ was still relatively new at the time, so there was a lot of class time wasted in getting students up to speed with its many features.

While not all students love using Twitter, it is workable in most situations. Roughly half of my students have Twitter accounts before they enroll in my class, and for those that don't, its a simple enough platform that I don't have to spend loads of time demonstrating the basics in class. Students who are truly worried about their professor creeping on their Twitter feed can easily and quickly set up a new one (which is something I recommend they do).

Now, along comes Spool, which promises to do much of the same link-saving as Read It Later and Instapaper, with the added perk of being able to do the same with video. We've been playing around with Spool, which remains in invite-only mode, for the past several days and found that it works (mostly) as advertised.

We also have invites available for those of you who want to try Spool out but don't want to wait around for an invite of your own.

Garg and Spencer are calling the technology behind the service SpoolBot, which Garg described as an artificial intelligence and computer vision engine. By residing on a server, SpoolBot can essentially translate content on a Web page into a format your device can understand. Garg said it was also good at keeping pace with changes on the sites where content is culled.

"What we wanted for ourselves was a simple way to have our favorite content always available, without worrying about which device I'm on (my Android phone vs. my iPad), where I am (inside, outside, home, work), or what kind of media it is (text, pdf, video)," Garg said in an email. "With one click you can save content from any of your devices, and that content shows up on all of your other devices too, is available offline, and is converted into a format that will work for you. So you don't need to worry about Flash and you don't need to worry about whether your phone has a PDF reader."

The one exception to that assertion that I found after a weekend of accessing a wide range of content in New York City's mostly WiFi-free subway system on my iPhone, iPad and laptop were YouTube videos, which can only be accessed with an Internet connection because of licensing agreements. As an aside, it also seemed as if YouTube videos accessed through Spool had more advertisements than when the same video was accessed straight through YouTubes site, and it was trickier to skip over ads using Spool than it is on YouTube.

I also didn't like that I couldn't tag videos and content or organize it into lists: my only choices were Unread, Read, Favorites and Archived. Garg assured me that adding some sort of organization and classification system was on the firm's to-do list and should be available within the next few weeks.

Saving material on Spool was, for the most part, easy. A Google Chrome extension allowed me to save videos and other content with one click. Setting up the widget on other devices was slightly more time-consuming.

Spool also connects to DropBox, allowing you to save content in a folder on DropBox and then have it automatically saved on your Spool. Users can also push content to Facebook from the Android app, the webapp, and the Chrome browser extension, with plans to add the feature to the Firefox extension and iOS app.

Users cannot, however, push content to Twitter. "We used to let users Tweet out from within the app. We've removed this feature because very few users used it," Garg said. "We're going to soon launch a feature to let users tweet links at us and we'll put those URLs into Spool."

Spool will remain in it's beta, invite-only phase at least until the Spring. ReadWriteWeb readers, however, can try Spool out without waiting for an invite.

Prior to O'Neal's unsolicited endorsement, Tout, which just launched in April, was largely unknown. After Shaq's quick message thanking fans, however, interest in the service exploded. "We got lucky with him being so involved with it," said Melissa Breen of Tout.

But since then, interest in Shaq may have risen thanks for Tout.

Breen claims other Tout users are seeing a boost in followers as a result of the service. A sizzle reel she played on Saturday at Columbia University's social media weekend in New York big increases from average users to Ryan Seacrest. Traffic on the site is growing at about 25% per month.

It's hard to attribute how much of the growth is organic and how much can be attributed to Tout. But the company likes to point to CBS News anchor Katie Couric, who gained 10,000 new Twitter followers within 10 days after she started using the service.

"We don't want to take credit...[but] the only answer is that it's more immersive. People want to connect," Tout's Gardner Loulan told CNET.

In some kind of conflation of Facebook with the government, a puppet representing Anonymous threatened Facebook with an attack in retaliation for SOPA/PIPA (though other Anonymous sources denied involvement). That was scheduled for three days from now. The organization has declared war against Facebook in the past, but Facebook is no ordinary target. It's the cream of the crop. It's practically never down. Has Anonymous finally cracked it?

cough cough, uh, looks like facebook.com is having a slight accessibility problem. #Anonymous

Well, no. Facebook is still working right now, but not reliably. It has completely failed to load in a few of our tests. Thomas Knoll posted a screenshot of the outage on Google+ at 5:17 p.m.. (Update 7:10 p.m.: We've confirmed with Facebook that the site issues this afternoon were caused by a code push. That's all it was.)

Just two days ago, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) drafted a new readiness plan for dealing with attacks from the likes of Anonymous. Maybe President Obama's "cyber threats" from last night's State of the Union address are real, after all.

UPDATE 5:45 p.m.: The @YourAnonNews account claims to have called off the attack (again indirectly).

You are now free to play Farmville and Mobwars.

— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) January 26, 2012

UPDATE 6:37 p.m.: One "official" Anonymous outlet denies responsibility outright.

#Facebook.com is NOT under denial of service attack. STOP LYING.

— AnonOps (@anonops) January 26, 2012

Now the first one says it trolled us. And it did. But I ask you: Who are the real trolls here? The ones who make stuff up, or the ones who report their made-up stuff as dubious, probably made-up stuff?

Facebook down? goo.gl/lZo9n -- Bwahaha, trolled! #Anonymous ^_^

— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) January 26, 2012

See also: How Could Anonymous "Destroy" Facebook?

I know what you're thinking. But as much as we (and I) have issues with Facebook's feelings about privacy and data, sharing intrinsically makes us feel connected. Here are five frictionless sharing apps that do so in a non-creepy way.

FoodSpotting, that wonderful little app that lets users share what they're eating and where they're eating it, is a natural fit for Facebook social sharing. If you're a foodie who is friends with other foodies on Facebook, chances are you're already discussing food. Just think about the number of Instagrammed food photos that you already see in your Facebook news feed. Sharing pictures of what you're eating isn't weird, and sharing them with your Facebook friends will not only expand your visual food vocabulary, it might help you connect with other like-minded foodies. The FoodSpotting social app also makes finding Facebook less cumbersome, since you're already on the network.

Foodily: Another Harmless Food App

Food is social. We have people over for dinner, we get invited to dinner parties, people cook us food when they want to apologize or just get to know us. The Foodily Facebook app just makes sense. Why not share what you're cooking with your Facebook friends? Let's say you have some buffalo burgers in the freezer, and you're sick of Googling recipes or using the Epicurious food app for your iPhone. You're wondering what friends are cooking, or maybe you just want to share what you are cooking. Do that with the Foodily app. You can also follow different recipes for the same food. I just followed Buffalo Burger, for example, which brings up an impressive selection.

Where I've Been: Show Off Your Worldliness

Unless you're super paranoid about your friends know where you've traveled and lived, this app's won't feel creepy. It's not weird to learn about peoples' life experiences. What's weird when it comes to location on social networks is knowing where your friends are at all times. Not only is that unnecessary, it's also rather stalker-ish. (And it's why I stopped checking into places on Facebook and using Foursquare.) Would I tell a somewhat new-ish friend that I once lived in Nicaragua? Certainly. Would I tell that same person via a Facebook share? Probably. It's an experience that I'm proud of. The "Where I've Been" social app on Facebook makes those types of experiences easier to share with a broader group of people.

Pinterest Friends Facebook

The pinning craze is on, and it's dominated by women ages 25-44 years-old. Pinterest is 80% women and 20% gentlemen. Thinking along those lines, a Facebook Pinterest app might actually help diversify the Pinterest audience by bringing in more Facebook boys. Or it could go the other way: Women who are already using Pinterest will install the Facebook app, and just double-share what they're pinning to both social networks. Regardless, the creepiness factor here is pretty minimal. Pinterest is an image-sharing service that people use to curate and cull together their favorite images from the Web. It's like Tumblr but slightly more personal.

Pinterest has been quite a hot button topic around ReadWriteWeb: Jon Mitchell argues that Pinterest actually tackles sharing better than Google+. John Paul Titlow admits to passively using Pinterest for sharing over the past few weeks, curating images that relate to the "future of music," which is one of his beats. Dave Copeland wrote "A Guy's Guide to Pinterest," which argues that the site isn't just for the ladies. I can't help but wonder if the Pinterest Facebook app will prove all my colleagues wrong, especially when it comes to the crossover audience of Facebook and Pinterest.

Social Movie Watching: Rotten Tomatoes

As social TV becomes less of an idea and more of a reality, sharing what movies you want to watch really isn't strange at all. The Rotten Tomatoes app is pretty unobtrusive, too. Sign in using your Facebook account, then connect to the site. I don't mind sharing the movies I'd like to see with my Facebook friends. Just the other day, a friend had posted a clip from the John Waters movie, "Female Trouble," and I commented on it. That turned out to be an interesting Facebook conversation about John Waters' films. Would I do the same thing about a movie I found on Rotten Tomatoes? Certainly. Sometimes "liking" something is just a conversation starter.

"Facebook has always been based on a real name culture," a Facebook spokesperson says to me via email. "We fundamentally believe this leads to greater accountability and a safer and more trusted environment for people who use the service." But what if you need to maintain a fake profile for personal, professional, security or creative reasons?

Chicago-based performance artist Daaimah Mubashshir maintains two Facebook profiles: one for her current self, which includes her theater work, and another for her "old" self. She is currently working on a show called "The Untangling at the Junction," which delves directly into issues about being black and queer in an Islamic environment, and it's something she prefers not to share with people from her past. (Full disclosure: Daaimah and I worked together about a year ago on a sketch comedy show "Aqua and Baum is Broke as Hell.")

"My old/asexual profile is full of extended family, religious people from my childhood and work colleagues who are unfamiliar with my theater work," she says. "I came to the decision that now, while I am in the development mode for these projects, it is not the time to be responding to comments or fielding questions about sensitive topics."

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will never live down his statement about how, if he were to recreate Facebook today, user information would be public by default. Sure, he backpedaled on that later and adjusted Facebook's privacy settings, but that statement pretty much sums up his understanding of sensitive, personal information that people post.

"Facebook and Google are not at all interested in recreating identity," says Mubashshir. "I think that these are businesses profiting from data gathering, so the identity piece is just a selling point to keep its users interested. Sure they could approach things differently but why would they when we give them what they want for free now?"

Fake Facebook Profile #2: The Importance of a Pen Name

Chicago-based writer Jerry Brennan has two Facebook profiles - oh wait, three, actually. When he first joined Facebook, Jerry was just himself. "It didn't occur to me to have another for awhile," he says. That was, until he published a book and started blogging under his pen name, Alfonso Mangione. But that was years before he set up his own Facebook profile.

"Indeed, in the course of getting my book reviewed, writing reviews for other peoples' books, blogging, and generally trying to keep an active online presence, I ended up knowing several people only through my pen name," says Brennan. And so Alfonso's Facebook profile was born. He is a "real" person, he has published a book, and he regularly communicates with his friends.

"Alfonso Mangione also ended up becoming a different persona, someone who would do and say things I wouldn't do or say--hopefully entertaining, and something to live up my friends' Facebook feeds, but he can be an ass at times."

Brennan also sees the importance of developing an online following. "We [writers] need to get an audience before we can get an audience." His third fake Facebook profile is Muamar Gadhafi, but that didn't end up as Brennan intended.

"I read about the Bronx Zoo's Cobra's rapid ascension in number of followers, and the various dead bin Ladens, and figured I'd have a go at it myself...except Gadhafi didn't really take off like either of them, so I really wouldn't mind if they killed him off." (Full disclosure: I am reading Jerry's latest manuscript, "Resistance," a World War II mystery of sorts.)

Fake Facebook Profile #3: Just For Laughs...

Baumshaquita Siegel is a 20-something Jewigga wannabe famous rap star from the northern suburbs of Chicago. She spends her days frying chicken at Harold's Chicken Shack, and her evenings either being a Lupe Fiasco wannabe or hanging out with her granny at their shared apartment in the orthodox Jewish West Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago.

As believable as this sounds, however, Baumshaquita (Baum for short) is not a real person. She is a sketch comedy character that I created and sometimes refer to as my "alter ego."

I thought about creating a Twitter account for Baumshaquita (@shitbaumsayz), but she said more than just "shit." Plus, all of Baum's "friends" were on Facebook. Because of Facebook's easy comment threads, she had a few very memorable conversations. One time she not-so-subtly hit on the person that I (Alicia) was dating. Another time she lamented the homelessness problem near her place of work. Baum is a general disrupter and Internet loudmouth, frequently calling out to all her "wiggas" who also chill on Facebook.

Baum is also a stereotype, simultaneously poking fun at herself and the idea of "wiggers," which urbandictionary.com defines as "a male Caucasian, usually born and raised in the suburbs that displays a strong desire to emulate African-American Hip Hop culture and style through 'bling' fashion and generally accepted 'thug life' guiding principles." Baum stayed on Facebook long after the show ended, making new friends and annoying old ones. She knows a lot of folks that I (Alicia) don't.

Fake Facebook Profile #4: The Anonymous Security Professional

Fellow ReadWriteWeb Writer David Strom spoke with his friend who works as a security professional. Because of the sensitive nature of this person's job, they maintain a number of Facebook profiles. This person was happy to answer questions anonymously.

"As a security professional, I needed to experience Facebook usage, controls, and risks first-hand," this person writes. "However, I do prefer to keep my personal and business life separate. Moreover, if my Facebook account were to be targeted by those who might get a kick out of hacking a security professional, I didn't want to expose my personal contacts to social engineering." This person's Facebook friends are entirely personal, and limited to people with whom they want to stay in close contact.

Interestingly, this same person maintains a real Twitter handle for business, and Facebook and Twitter personas exclusively for a charity. "In that case, uniform messaging is important, perhaps even essential. I just use both to extend marketing reach, other charities tend to follow us on Twitter, while individuals tend to 'like' us on Facebook."

Fake Facebook Profiles #5: An 8-Year-Old Facebook Game Player

"My teenage daughter used to use a fake profile to help her garner more points in games," says ReadWriteWeb's Community Manager Robyn Tippins. "When she tired of it, my then 8-year-old son took it over to play Facebook games."

I'm not going to reveal that fake Facebook profile's name. Surprisingly, Facebook has never noticed it.

"Ironically," says Robyn, "Facebook has twice shut down the 14-year-old's real account mistakenly. So the one who complies with the terms of service has twice been shut down and reinstated."

Meanwhile, the other profile still lives - and Robyn's son is now 9-years-old.

How To Play By Facebook's Rules

Angela Motola-Donofrio, owner of Free Spirit Yacht Cruises Inc., says she, too, has multiple Facebook accounts. But of all the people I spoke to, Angela is the only person who handles multiple accounts in the Facebook way.

Angela opened her personal Facebook account in December 2007, but didn't do anything with it until the summer of 2008.

"I noticed people were posting pictures of their Free Spirit Yacht Cruises events on their pages and that got me interested in Facebook," she says. "Once I started posting pictures and sharing with family and friends, I found it was easier than email and more fun. I do have Free Spirit clients as friends because I didn't have a business or group page in the beginning, and a lot of our clients come back year after year and they are like friends."

Angela did open a group page and a business page, but is now trying to get rid of the group page and focus only on the business page. "We like to share photos, blog posts, events, fun facts, videos on our business page," she writes. "It's not as interactive as we would like but still feel it's a great resource for potential and existing clients."

She also does not see Facebook as a reflection of who she is, which is more in line with who adults are using Facebook. "I have been using it more as a communication tool sharing experiences, photos...I believe in authenticity," Angela says. "You should be able to have different handles, but people should know who you are."

Facebook, Data and You

When I started writing this article, I was hoping Facebook would consider talking with me about the multi-faceted idea of identity in online communities. A Facebook spokesperson would have none of that, however.

"We require personal Profiles (Timelines) to be owned and run by a real-life person," a Facebook spokesperson told me. "It's against our terms of service to create more than one personal Profile. Instead, we encourage people to create a Page in order to establish a second presence on Facebook. Pages allow an organization, business, celebrity, band, pet or other entity to maintain a presence on Facebook."

Jerry Brennan works as a data manager by day, and he understands Facebook's "data mindset."

"If you have a table behind the scenes called 'Users,' you want each record in the table to represent one person, and you don't want any person to have more than one record, otherwise your database is not an accurate depiction of reality, and all sorts of craziness can ensue. It's the same reason we so jealously guard our social security numbers."

Facebook will also stick to its real-world name policy because it makes money off of ads which rely on real eyes from real, living people. If Facebook is populated by fake handles, pen names, sketch comedy characters, kids playing games, and security workers just trying to stay anonymous, well, Facebook's ad numbers will not be as accurate.

Will anyone actually abide by Facebook's rules? That is up to its users.

The L.A. Times reports that Chinese Internet users praised American Internet users for taking action against their own government. Wen Yunchao, a prominent Chinese blogger and government critic who left the mainland for Hong Kong, says that China's Great Firewall, which was initially about stopping online piracy and pornography, quickly became about Internet censorship of websites and content. Critics of SOPA/PIPA say that it would, in effect, do the same thing to the Internet in America.

"In China, all the government decisions are done in a dark box," said Wen. "No one knows what's going on. There's never any legal reason cited. If these laws are passed in the U.S., every step of the way it will be more transparent. People can challenge it. There's no comparison when it comes to censorship in China and in the U.S."

Senate Majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is delaying Tuesday's scheduled Senate vote on SOPA/PIPA. Reid still supports the anti-piracy bill, stating in a tweet that he does believe PROTECT IP raises "legitimate issues" regarding online counterfeiting and piracy.

China's History of Internet Censorship

China is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Analysts believe that China's economy could overtake the U.S. by 2019. It is also one of the most highly censored countries in terms of the Internet. Political censorship, also known as the "Great Firewall of China," is built into every layer of China's Internet infrastructure.

China blocked access to social networks Facebook and Twitter after Chinese hackers attempted to steal Google's company code and hack into Gmail accounts. Google shutdown many of its mainland China operations shortly thereafter, routing many of its users to Hong Kong.

Google returned to China nearly two years after the censorship battle.

The country currently has 500 million Internet users.

Access to Facebook, Google+ and Twitter are all currently banned by the Chinese government. Google may be renewing expansion efforts in China, but a recent crackdown on popular Chinese microblogging sites designed to mimic Twitter suggest that if any of the big three get the permission to operate in China, the nod will go to Facebook.

"On the one hand, microblogs can reflect the social situation and public opinion, and broadcast a positive public voice," Wang Chen, the minister in charge of the State Council Information Office, told Reuters "At the same time, microblogs... can make it easy to disseminate a few irrational voices, negative public opinion and harmful information."

The Chinese pilot programs require new weibo users to register their real names before they can post, and would eventually require existing users to register their real names as well. The sites have frequently been a source of information about government wrongdoing within China.

China has given no time frame of when it or even if it will open up to U.S.-based social networks, but the pilot program seems to favor a social network that already requires users to register with their real names. Twitter famously allows people to sign up anonymously, and Google+ was banned in China one day after it was launched last summer. But Facebook has tight rules on users registering its real name, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly planning another trip to China.

Despite the tight rules on free speech, which palso prohibit Internet users from saying anything negative about the ruling party, China remains the world's second biggest economy and a largely-untapped market for major U.S. tech companies. Last year, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told Time "it's impossible to think about connecting the whole world right now without also connecting China."