ReadWriteWeb

Facebook's social graph of you isn't you. It's an approximation and an extrapolation based on little clues you've left lying around the Web. Using your Facebook or Google identity gives those services more data points about what you do, but that doesn't mean it substitutes for whom you are.

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?

Several years ago, I spoke on a panel at an advertising industry conference with Om Malik and Michael Arrington. Arrington, my former employer, was bored by the conversation and mocked me throughout it. One of the last questions we were asked on the panel was what technology we were most excited about at the time. I said I was most excited by trends represented by a little startup called Rapportive, which sits in your Gmail sidebar and shows you aggregated information about whoever you are emailing.

Arrington laughed at me, just like he had laughed at me in the conference green room when I showed people photos on my phone of the chickens I was raising in my backyard. Just as I was vindicated when the TV show Portlandia later demonstrated that it is perfectly reasonable to raise chickens here in my home town, so too do I feel a little vindicated by the reported acquisition in the works of Rapportive by social network LinkedIn. OK, so both are a little silly. But the point is: Rapportive is awesome and I was right.

Google shipped some major changes to search today. The announcement was called "Search, plus Your World." It was the inevitable launch of the integration between Google's core product, Web search, and its new identity service, Google+. There are now two modes of search on Google, personal and global. Personal search shows users stuff from their Google+ circles, and global search is good old Google search, albeit with public Google+ posts included.

Before today, Google+ was shoved into Web search in uncomfortable ways. Public Google+ posts interfered with natural search when users were logged in. It looked like Google was going to force its social product into its users' lives. But that's not how it turned out. Today's updates put Google users' identities into their own hands.

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.

Chris Poole delivered the most powerful 10 minutes of Web philosophy of the afternoon at Web 2.0. The man formerly known as moot - founder of anonymous image sharing den 4chan and its new, better-lit cousin, Canvas, gave us a rousing and principled picture of what the big players get wrong about online identity.

"Google and Facebook would have you believe that you're a mirror," he said, "but in fact, we're more like diamonds." - multi-faceted. It was an appeal reminiscent of the one he gave at SXSW earlier this year, but it hit harder. Google Plus has since arrived, and Poole says it's even worse than Facebook for the future of online identity.

It seems like only yesterday RWW's own Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote the foreword to a book discussing the new ecosystem, business models and value chains in a hyper-connected world. In actuality, it was a little over a year ago when the book, The Shift, was released. It documented an 18-month primary research study commissioned by Alcatel-Lucent to assess the market potential of various network APIs - including presence, profiling and location, among others - across an ecosystem of developers, advertisers, consumers and enterprises.

Culling the inputs of over 10,000 respondents from the research, my co-author and I boldly predicted a $100 billion incremental market opportunity when telecom networks are leveraged as development platforms. The impressive figure is derived, in part, through the creation of new business models between developers, advertisers and service providers.

Founder of 4Chan, Chris Poole, aka moot, gave a particularly strong talk at Web 2.0 Expo, in which he asserted that Facebook and Google were doing it wrong, and that they should emulate Twitter's stance on identity.

After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web - Mobile, App Stores and Identity - plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

Chris Poole delivered the most powerful 10 minutes of Web philosophy of the afternoon at Web 2.0. The man formerly known as moot - founder of anonymous image sharing den 4chan and its new, better-lit cousin, Canvas, gave us a rousing and principled picture of what the big players get wrong about online identity.

"Google and Facebook would have you believe that you're a mirror," he said, "but in fact, we're more like diamonds." - multi-faceted. It was an appeal reminiscent of the one he gave at SXSW earlier this year, but it hit harder. Google Plus has since arrived, and Poole says it's even worse than Facebook for the future of online identity.

Facebook developer George Lee threw down the guantlet at F8 today by saying that he wants each of its 800 million users to have a relationship with at least one developer and that relationship should be focused on content.

"Every single user who is on Facebook should have some relationship with some developer that creates distribution," said Lee.

The next edition of Windows Server, still code-named "Windows Server 8," will have vastly expanded integration with Windows Azure, the company's cloud platform that started out as simply a .NET application provider. Not only will Azure become (as expected) a platform for providing data and services to Windows enterprise applications, but an identity manager for federating identity across multiple Web services, including client-side Metro apps.