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

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.

It wasn't a big acquisition (TechCrunch was told around $15m) but it was a validation of some big ideas.

Rapportive is a simple thing, and yet it's founded on some complex and potent technology trends. Trends like: identity as platform, harvesting of social network user data and APIs for cross-site functionality. On top of profile data and email adresses, you can build awesome tools.

Rapportive is magical; it's one of the first things I show people when I am excited to show them something about the internet. Many people immediately see the value of it. When we first wrote about it here, we titled our post Stop What You Are Doing Right Now and Install This Browser Plug-in. No one objected, it was clearly awesome. (The line Stop What You Are Doing is something best reserved for when you can really back it up.)

Since that time, Rapportive has served as one of the most compelling elements in the still-unfullfilling ecosystem of CRM applications floating around the internet. None solve all your problems, most are hard to make the time to come back to. Not Rapportive, though. Not if you're a Gmail user, anyway. It delivers relationship management value in almost every email you send and recieve.

Much of that value comes from the integration of 3rd party services. There's a whole list of apps built on Rapportive. They sit in your email, look at who you're corresponding with and then let you interact with that person or their content on other social networks. Twitter and LinkedIn have been the best in my experience, but enterprise Rapportive users may have prefered other apps on the platform.

Woe, woe to LinkedIn if they screw with this. If LinkedIn is to Rapportive as Twitter has been to Tweetdeck then I am going to be one unhappy user. If LinkedIn treats Rapportive as well as it has treated CardMunch (which is a miracle app) then we're in good shape.

LinkedIn may serve up less data in Rapportive simply because this is probably the end of Rapportive's relationship with the super-controversial social data mining service Rapleaf. Update: Rapportive contacted me to say they haven't been using Rapleaf for more than a year now. Noted! Many people hate Rapleaf, but they love the Rapportive interface that serves up some of that information. Fortunately Rapportive does not surface some of the information Rapleaf makes available, like home and car ownership and family status.

Rapportive was the best example of what could be done with aggregated user data though! All too often, when you ask someone about aggregated social network user data they immediately say "I'm opposed to it!"

As a platform for the creation of products, services, new ways to relate to the people and the web arround us though - Rapportive is a beautiful example of what the future of the web could be. It's not about apps like Path sucking your phone's contact info into its servers without telling you; it's not about services like Pinterest surreptitiously changing your shared URLs to capture affiliate revenue.

No, the future of user data as a platform, in its best form, is to show you the faces of the people you're meeting by email. It's about helping you connect with them. Hey, you might say, I see you sent me an email. I haven't had a chance to reply yet, but you'll notice that I just started following you on Twitter. (A person can also guess another person's email by guessing at variations of their name @ their company domain.com.)

I sure hope Rapportive can grow and thrive in its new home. And I hope that it will inspire whole new worlds of startups building

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.

As 4chan's Chris Poole so eloquently said last year, Google was moving toward a monolithic identity like the one Facebook offers. It seemed as though the only "you" that would matter on Google would be your Google+ profile. Last week, I couldn't take it anymore. I said Google+ was going to mess up the Internet by causing us to all rearrange our online identities around our Google+ profiles. I feared it would be the only way to matter in Google search.

To my surprise, Vic Gundotra himself saw where I was coming from. "Honestly, Jon has a few good points," he wrote. "We are working to address."

Little did I know, a huge overhaul of Google's search interface was less than a week away. When Google Fellow Ben Gomes showed me around, I was astonished by the extent to which users could control the experience. For those who want no part in this social search business, there's a total opt-out switch in search settings. If you stick with social search, as I plan to try to do, there's a toggle button to switch between personal and global modes.

That was enough for me to give the feature a chance. It's not evil if you can turn it off. But today, as I've been playing around with the new Google, I observed one of the new features in action, and I'm even more intrigued now.

I don't have the new personal search available yet, but some of the underlying new features are already working. When I searched for "everything is ablaze," the name of my personal WordPress blog, I was presented with a new set of options. Right inside the search result, it asked whether this was my blog. I hadn't added this to my Google+ profile yet, because it's for crazy, personal stuff, and I use my Google+ profile for work.

I indicated that yes, this is me. It then asked me a second question: Did I want to add Everything is ablaze! to my public Google profile? I said 'no,' and that was that. If I understood what happened correctly, people connected to me in personal search will now find my blog because it is by me, but I'm still free to keep that invisible in my profile.

That's the way I want it. My online identity is bigger than Google+. It includes a bunch of blogs, a podcast and a Twitter account, which is my main presence. That Twitter account is already listed in my Google+ profile. So will my tweets surface in Google's social searches for me? I've been led to believe so.

Google's Definition of "Your World"

John Battelle posted his reservations about today's update, lamenting the fact that Google's personal search would lean so heavily on Google+ and Picasa content but not include Facebook's, for example. I agree with that complaint; we should be able to express our online identities however we want on whatever services we choose.

Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land asked Amit Singhal about this, and here's what he said:

"Facebook and Twitter and other services, basically, their terms of service don't allow us to crawl them deeply and store things. Google+ is the only [network] that provides such a persistent service. ... Of course, going forward, if others were willing to change, we'd look at designing things to see how it would work."

MG Siegler doesn't believe it will happen. It's healthy to remain skeptical about that. But even before I got social search, Google indicated to me that it's looking for me on other services. It let me indicate that my WordPress blog is me. That's a social signal that will affect personal search, and it doesn't come from Google+.

It's true that Google's personal search will present Google-hosted content more attractively and with more features. I can't retweet a Twitter result from right inside Google search. But my Google profile associates my Twitter account with me. Yes, Twitter and Google's relationship is on ice. But tweets are ultimately Web pages, Google sees them, and it asks whether that Twitter account is you. The implementation might not live up to the ideal, but at least Google is trying to let our other Web identities be a part of us.

Facebook? Twitter? Your thoughts?

UPDATE 1:23 p.m.: MG Siegler got a response from Twitter about today's update:

"For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet.

Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic. As we've seen time and time again, news breaks first on Twitter; as a result, Twitter accounts and Tweets are often the most relevant results.

We're concerned that as a result of Google's changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that's bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users."

Sure they're concerned. Is it true, though? It's not like Twitter's own search tools are that helpful; Google is still the best Twitter search tool there is. It recently acquired Julpan, a social search company, so maybe Twitter has a better idea. But if you search for content that's on Twitter, Google will find it. If Twitter wants full-featured integration into Google search, that's up to them. I'm sure Google would be delighted to oblige.

Nothing about today's update makes things worse for Google's competitors in Google results. If anything, it just means they have more work to do.

UPDATE 1/11 8:07 a.m.: Yesterday evening, Google posted a snide response to Twitter on Google+ suggesting that the collapse of the Google-Twitter real-time search deal was Twitter's fault. It also says that Google has observed Twitter's rel=nofollow instructions, so that Google cannot fully crawl Twitter users' streams.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt told Search Engine Land yesterday that Google is perfectly willing to talk about integrating Facebook and Twitter into social search. The problem is that it has to happen on those companies' terms. If they could just strike a deal, social search would be great for users. Let's hope they work out their little tiff.

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.

"The scale of secrets was so large," Warren says, "that even 1% of bad content was overwhelming for our dedicated team of volunteer moderators who worked 24 hours a day 7 days a week removing content that was not just pornographic but also gruesome and at times threatening." In my experience, that 1% figure sounds a bit conservative. The chances of seeing something gross were pretty good on any given night.

Warren says that he had to remove the app from his own daughter's phone weeks ago. Bullies and creeps overloaded the app, and Warren and the moderators were unable to find a solution. At one point, the moderator team tried pre-screening 30,000 secrets a day, but they couldn't stem the tide of unsavory secrets.

Warren calls the now-defunct PostSecret app a "good faith experiment," but it's also an unfortunate lesson in the necessity of curation. It raised the privacy bar for app developers, but it opened up a Pandora's Box of backwardness in doing so. The app was rife with penis pics, vicious attacks and other disturbing messages. It was a valiant attempt to allow millions more to share their secrets, but for now, the PostSecret project will go back to its roots as a hand-curated blog.

Those who paid for the app can take comfort in the fact that their $1.99 supported an organization with good intentions.

Did you use the PostSecret app? What did you think of the experiment? How do you feel about the app shutting down? Share your thoughts in the comments.

"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.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we're re-publishing some of our best posts of 2011. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2012. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Identity Is Prismatic

"The portrait of identity online is often painted in black and white," Poole said. "Who you are online is who you are offline." That rosy view of identity is complemented with a similarly oversimplified view of anonymity. People think of anonymity as dark and chaotic, Poole said.

But human identity doesn't work like that online or offline. We present ourselves differently in different contexts, and that's key to our creativity and self-expression. "It's not 'who you share with,' it's 'who you share as,'" Poole told us. "Identity is prismatic."

Choosing Our Own Identities

"We were on the right track at one point," Poole said. In the early days of the Web, its creators used their real names because they were the only people online. As the namespace got more crowded, people started using handles.

AOL Instant Messenger brought screen names to the mainstream. Poole said he agonized over his AOL handle, because he knew it would be a representation of him. That insight persists today at hacker conventions, where the real Web experts hang out. People there introduce themselves with their handles, because that's how they have chosen to identify.

"Twitter does the best job of this" of today's major social networks, Poole said. The platform itself uses handles and allows made-up answers in the real name field. Furthermore, "most of the apps allow multiple accounts. Facebook would never allow this, right?" He says Google Plus is the worst; you don't even get a vanity URL to distinguish yourself, and we all know how Google Plus handles pseudonyms: they delete the accounts.

Google & Facebook Are Eroding Our Options

Google and Facebook are "consolidating identity and making people seem more simple than they really are," Poole said. "Our options are being eroded."

Poole's bottom line is that there's a big market opportunity in this authentic, fluid kind of identity, which the big players are willfully abandoning. "You can incorporate identity without forcing your users to sacrifice something." Poole believes a Web network can validate an account using legitimate services without forcing the presentation of that user to be an over-simplification.

Creativity and self-expression are at stake, Poole says, and he's particularly concerned about young people. Facebook's new Timeline will lock people into their Facebook identities from birth.

Speaking at Facebook recently, Poole told its developers that they set the bar for identity, but he has since realized he was wrong: we, the users, do. "We're about to sacrifice something that's valuable, and it's special."

"I would ask us all to strive for this ideal when we design products, and as users on the Web, what we demand of services," Poole said. "Facebook and Google do identity wrong, Twitter does it better, and I want people to think about what the world would be like if we did it right."

Check out the Web 2.0 schedule and watch the events live here.

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.

4chan's Chris Poole: Facebook & Google Are Doing It Wrong

Chris Poole had already stressed the importance of anonymity earlier this year at SXSW, but since the release of Google Plus, which he says is even more worrying, he reiterated his assertion that allowing handles on the web is essential. The resulting discussion of the ramifications of forced real names, handles and identity as only based on the name on your ID card, was one of the most interesting I've seen in months. When you take the time to read through this story, don't forget to pour through the comments. There's real wisdom therein.

Where Is the iPhone Malware? Lookout Releases iOS Security App

Lookout, a popular Android security app, has released a version of their app for iOS. The app works differently on iOS than on Android, primarily in that it doesn't detect and remove malware. Dan explains the other differences, including the fact that the new app wasn't possible until iCloud was released.

Everything that Lookout does is in the cloud - almost nothing runs on the device itself.

ReadWriteWeb Meetups Around the World

Did you miss our Portland meetup? We're throwing a worldwide technology meetup on November 15 and you're invited! Right now we already have meetups planned in Tokyo, Seoul, Vladivostok, Russia, Amsterdam, New Zealand, St. Louis, MO, Washington, DC and more.

Reach out to our community manager if you have any questions or need some help with promotion.

More Top Posts:

• Teenagers Will, Like, Totally Abandon Facebook for Google+
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• Infographic: A History of Facebook Failures
• Gmail to Unveil New Interface to Help Fight Information Overload
• Meet the New APIs Behind Android Ice Cream Sandwich
• Why You Can't Downgrade iOS
• Mary Meeker's 2011 Web 2.0 Summit Presentation
• How Mobile Payments Will Evolve In the Next Several Years

ReadWriteWeb Channels

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• Infographic: A History of Facebook Failures
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• Diaspora Becomes PayPal's Latest Victim
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• Chrome Gets Text-to-Speech APIs
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"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.

Identity Is Prismatic

"The portrait of identity online is often painted in black and white," Poole said. "Who you are online is who you are offline." That rosy view of identity is complemented with a similarly oversimplified view of anonymity. People think of anonymity as dark and chaotic, Poole said.

But human identity doesn't work like that online or offline. We present ourselves differently in different contexts, and that's key to our creativity and self-expression. "It's not 'who you share with,' it's 'who you share as,'" Poole told us. "Identity is prismatic."

Choosing Our Own Identities

"We were on the right track at one point," Poole said. In the early days of the Web, its creators used their real names because they were the only people online. As the namespace got more crowded, people started using handles.

AOL Instant Messenger brought screen names to the mainstream. Poole said he agonized over his AOL handle, because he knew it would be a representation of him. That insight persists today at hacker conventions, where the real Web experts hang out. People there introduce themselves with their handles, because that's how they have chosen to identify.

"Twitter does the best job of this" of today's major social networks, Poole said. The platform itself uses handles and allows made-up answers in the real name field. Furthermore, "most of the apps allow multiple accounts. Facebook would never allow this, right?" He says Google Plus is the worst; you don't even get a vanity URL to distinguish yourself, and we all know how Google Plus handles pseudonyms: they delete the accounts.

Google & Facebook Are Eroding Our Options

Google and Facebook are "consolidating identity and making people seem more simple than they really are," Poole said. "Our options are being eroded."

Poole's bottom line is that there's a big market opportunity in this authentic, fluid kind of identity, which the big players are willfully abandoning. "You can incorporate identity without forcing your users to sacrifice something." Poole believes a Web network can validate an account using legitimate services without forcing the presentation of that user to be an over-simplification.

Creativity and self-expression are at stake, Poole says, and he's particularly concerned about young people. Facebook's new Timeline will lock people into their Facebook identities from birth.

Speaking at Facebook recently, Poole told its developers that they set the bar for identity, but he has since realized he was wrong: we, the users, do. "We're about to sacrifice something that's valuable, and it's special."

"I would ask us all to strive for this ideal when we design products, and as users on the Web, what we demand of services," Poole said. "Facebook and Google do identity wrong, Twitter does it better, and I want people to think about what the world would be like if we did it right."

Check out the Web 2.0 schedule and watch the events live here.

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

In other words, developers should be focused on creating apps that help people know themselves better, which might have a profound effect on how apps are traditionally developed. In a way, apps are the new brands and developers are the new brand managers.

Lee explained how apps should be talking about "the intention of what the user wants to share." This is completely about the media, like music shared in Spotify, where people find meaning in their lives.

"You are an extension of something they want to already share, but they just want to do it in a more structured and interesting way," said Lee.

Li said that he didn't think it was an "ilegitimate goal" to make sure that all 800 million people on the social network will have a fundamentally human and "healthy" relationship with the work being done by developers.

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.

Keeping a Secret

If you choose to save a list of your secrets on your phone, which you don't have to do, it's password-protected. You can connect to Facebook or Twitter to share links to interesting secrets you discover, but the social settings page reassures you that the services "are never connected in any way to secrets that you submit." The introductory splash screen says that users' identity, location and secrets will never be connected to one another. The app won't even know your name.

The app was designed in partnership with Bonobo Labs, and it takes the familiar iPhone tropes for social photo apps and makes them its own.


An Intimate Experience

The navigation is familiar, but the textures and fonts are dark and soothing. The graphics are a lot to take in at first; the map view is especially hard to navigate and slow to respond. But this app extends the comfortable touch of the barebones Blogger-powered PostSecret website into an intimate touchscreen experience.

Another aspect of the PostSecret project enhanced by the app is commenting. On the weekly blog, Frank Warren, PostSecret's creator, curates some email comments regarding individual secrets and inserts them between images, often setting up interesting - if artificial - dialogues. Now, with the app, readers can engage in threaded discussions on each secret, but comments are posted as their own secrets, with the app's typography and one's own chosen background image.

This app enables people to air their deepest secrets and share them with one another, but it still maintains a safe space.

Update 11/12, 5:50 p.m.: The app's performance can be pretty slow, but Warren says there's an update coming soon. There's also a key feature missing; you can't yet view replies to your own secrets. But Warren reassures us: "We think that is an important feature too, and it will be included in the first update due out this week."

Strength in Sharing Secrets

Warren has published the sites most beautiful secrets in books, and he speaks publicly about the power of the project. According to the blog, within 24 hours of its launch, the PostSecret app became the #1 best-selling App in the U.S. and Canada.

The app is available now in the iTunes store, and an Android version is coming soon.

Do you read PostSecret?

Tonight the Google Plus team responded to the extensive public conversation. Its decision? Instead of immediately suspending accounts that seem to violate the policy, and then letting users appeal, now Google will send warnings that users have 4 days to comply with the policy before they are suspended. In other words: the policy stays, the enforcement of it will just be slowed down.

Above, Google Plus product manager Saurabh Sharma delivers the Love it Or Leave it message in a video. Ironically, while real life is the rule when it comes to Identity, Sharma himself said in the very last message he posted before this video that "I refuse to hang out in person anymore."

Perhaps the Internet isn't about freedom, an ethereal new dimension that overcomes the limitations of time and space. Perhaps it's really just a place to bow down before the alter of Zynga.

As an otherwise unidentified Google Plus user called Melissa Draper (is that Draper's real name? Some sort of MadMen assumed identity reference?) posted in response to Sharma's statement: "What about the people who are isolated in the real world because of the realities of their real world circumstances? Do they really no longer get to connect? That's incredibly sad."

Update: Google's Joseph Smarr refers us to this video interview (at 9:30) he did with Alex Howard, where among other things he offers the following explanation. (Thanks to Carolyn Martin for the transcription.)

"It's not just enough to offer the ability to post under a pseudonymous identifier. If you're going to make the commitment that we're not going to out your real identity, that actually takes a lot of work, right? Especially if you're using your real account to log in, and then posting under a pseudonym. And so we feel a real responsibility that if we're gonna make the claim to people, "it's safe, you're not gonna get outed", that we really think through the architecture end to end and make sure that there aren't any loopholes or gotchas where all of a sudden you get outed. And that's actually a hard thing to do in software. And so, I think that's [ ]an angle people often miss ... we don't want to do it wrong so we'd rather wait until we get it right."

Does that sound like Google might change this policy in the future? I've followed up with Smarr to ask for more details.

That's the message that all the people being kicked off of Plus are receiving, but most of them are being removed from the network due to their use of pseudonyms. The ban against pseudonyms is being applied very subjectively as well, but as far as I know, Blake Ross is really Blake Ross. The other 8 Blake Rosses have been allowed to stay so far. This one had 10,000 people following him on Plus when he was kicked off, too. If you weren't convinced this policy was reckless and excessive before, this certainly calls it all the more into question.

Above, a screenshot of Ross's Plus profile in Google's cache, taken Saturday. Today visiting Ross' profile URL returns a 404 error, "The requested URL was not found on this server. That's all we know." I've emailed Google's press hotline to see if that's really all the company knows. Update: A Google person sent us what appears to be a form email back in response, saying the company cannot comment on particular account suspensions and referred us to this statement on the banning policy by Bradley Horowitz. I've pushed back and asked for a specific comment, given that Blake Ross is probably one of the most important people on the entire email.

We're hearing that this process is almost if not entirely automated and is capturing a whole lot of people clearly by mistake; in many cases banned people are quickly returned to the network.

From the screenshot it looks like poor Ross had to deal with the same semi-coherent ramblings about alleged Facebook bugs and poor design that he no doubt has to deal with on Facebook.com, too. Nonetheless, he seems to find the removal of his Plus profile objectionable. "Google+ banned me for having the audacity to be named Blake Ross?" he Tweeted tonight. "Are they just banning all FB'ers? I smell fear."

When it comes to names, pen names and anonymity, though, then it's often a matter of freedom, power and social marginalization. The My Name is Me project ("Supporting your freedom to choose the name you use on social networks and other online services.") is a notable effort to illuminate the issues at hand.

But come on, the guy who cofounded the second most popular browser on earth? The guy now in charge of product at Facebook? Google has let the Big Z keep his profile on Plus, even though he's done nothing publicly visible with it yet.

Presumably this is a mistake and the famous Blake Ross will be allowed to return to Google's social network along with the other eight Blake Rosses there once Google leadership hears about this in the morning. As has already been said many times in regards to this policy, though, if you're not so well connected - then you probably won't have as much luck.

Update: After publication, we're hearing that the bot we might call The Plusblaster is banning people so willy-nilly that many people are being allowed back on when mistakes are made.

None the less, this is not just a technical problem: a policy that prohibits identity obfuscation is likely to have substantially adverse consequences on a societal level.

Facebook, of course, has the same policy requiring that users create accounts under their real names.

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.

Founded in Edmonton Canada in late 2009, the site allows users to sync their social media profiles to a Web interface and calculate a personal value and share price. From there you can buy and sell shares in companies and people on a virtual stock market based on the perceived value of their online reputations.

Empire Avenue users earn virtual currency and reputation points in a variety of ways including:

1. by successfully forecasting and buying stock that sees an increase in social value over time;
2. by earning endorsements and recommendations; and perhaps most importantly,
3. by reaching large social media audiences.

But just as Twitter's mainstream debut marked an increase in follower baiting and follower purchases, Empire Avenue's rise in popularity has also lead to an increase in abuses.

Basically you're looking at chatrooms full of virtual collusion and insider trading. For an early-stage startup, this may seem like a great problem to have. It's clear that if users feel the need to cheat your system, then your company is popular enough to matter.

But from a reputation management standpoint, this poses a conundrum. How do you separate the wheat from the chaffe? It's suspicious that super blogger Robert Scoble's social stock price is rivaled by unknowns who've published less that a dozen pieces of popular content in their lives. As a reputation management system, shouldn't your own company strive for trust amongst its users?

If engagement in the form of retweets, comments and Facebook likes are the new measurement for online influencers, then Empire Avenue's intended mechanics make it literal. But in order for any reputation-based community to be meaningful, it needs to mitigate against a land grab mentality and protect itself against unsavory users.

For the company's sake, I hope it's able to tweak its mechanics and correct for this. After all, online reputation startups should know better than anyone that success hinges on whether or not your trustworthiness becomes viral amongst key audiences.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/reputation_management_services_should_practice_what_they_preach.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/reputation_management_services_should_practice_what_they_preach.php Digital Lifestyle Tue, 26 Apr 2011 15:00:00 -0800 Dana Oshiro

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.

Some, such as blogger Robert Scoble, argue that linking comments to Facebook identity increases authenticity, not only by adding context to what people say, but also that people cannot anonymously pose as other people. Poole, at least when speaking of authenticity in terms of creativity, appears to take quite the opposite position.

"Anonymity is authenticity," said Poole. "It allows you to share in an unvarnished, unfiltered, raw and real way. We believe in content over creator."

Of course, when we speak of 4chan, we're talking about a collection of memes and creations that few bloggers or publishers would want to grace their comments section. 

Poole argued that identity can stifle content creators (whether commenters or otherwise) because of what's at stake.

"The cost of failure is really high when you're contributing as yourself," said Poole. "To fail in an environment where you're contributing with your real name is costly."

On this point, Scoble had a very different opinion when he wrote last week. "REAL change comes from people putting their necks on the line. I couldn't remember a time when an anonymous person really enacted change in, well, anything. It's why I sign my name to everything, even stuff that could get me fired," wrote Scoble.

What do you think - do you want Poole's version of authenticity? Will anonymity always lead to the variety of creativity we see on 4chan? Or is anonymity a necessary party of true honesty and authenticity?

Sometimes, websites like Facebook or Google make the tiniest change and it makes headlines. This is one of those times. Today, 600 million member strong Facebook added two new options to its list of relationship status possibilities: "In a civil union" and "In a domestic partnership."

It's not that this change has wide-reaching effects in terms of usability or functionality, but rather that it is an acknowledgement and acceptance of newly adopted societal norms. It is a validation, by the site many people use to define themselves online, that same-sex marriages, civil unions and other non-traditional relationships have reached a level that deserve recognition.

We confirmed the new relationship statuses on our own accounts and took a screenshot of our own.

In some ways, it's actually extremely surprising that it took Facebook this long. After all, civil unions and domestic partnerships have both been around for many years now and have even achieved legal status in a number of states and countries.

Of course, whenever something new is added, it immediately calls into question why other options aren't available. Facebook-alternative Diaspora alluded to this when it made gender an open-ended text field rather than a multiple-choice question. Now that Facebook has gone a step further with its relationship options, how will it handle gender definitions? Will it remain binary or will it open up to more possibilities, as Diaspora did?

Facebook had this to say on the topic:

"This has been a highly requested feature from users. We want to provide options for people to genuinely and authentically reflect their relationships on Facebook."

The feature is not yet available but was spotted in developer documentation and first reported on by the watchdog blog Google Operating System. While this might seem like a simple matter of convenience, it also represents the convergence of a number of other trends in online computing.

Above, a mock-up of how the Mac version of Chrome might display which account is running in a particular window. New browser windows will use the same account that the last active window was using, and all browser extensions will be common across all windows regardless of account.

Incidentally, speaking from one ad-supported company to another, it's hard not to notice that there's Ad Block Plus running in the mock-up screenshot of this browser. Thanks, Google.

What it All Means

Computing in the cloud. The browser as a key to identity. Personalization of the computing experience. Those are the kinds of things we see here and in many other developments on the web, to put this news in context.

It would be great to see different browser window identities entirely partitioned off from each other, with different sets of cookies, so that you could run different accounts on Twitter, Facebook and other services at the same time too.

Consider this in conjunction with Chrome's plan to experiment with predictive background tab preloading for "wicked fast navigation" and I think you'll agree - the world of the browser looks to be very different in the future.

What's Google's economic incentive to develop features like this? The nicer it is to browse, the more you'll do it, and the more you browse - the more ads you'll see. That's not the whole story, but it is the part that pays the bills.