I suspect what this really means is that Facebook doesn't need explicit identity markers anymore to work out who you are. That's done and trained. Now they benefit from additional metadata like "I don't want this message to be sent with my standard identity".
Zuck said unnamed new apps possibly won't require you to log-in and this is a giant step forward for identity? Wait until they actually do it and then wait until they do it with something important.
My excitement is that Mark, who has been extremely staunch in his belief in "Facebook identity" (First Name/Last Name/Profile Pic, Online == Offline), is starting to consider alternatives to that. It remains to be seen what that will ultimately amount to for Facebook's product/app offerings, but it's a huge shift in his personal beliefs.
I wrote up some thoughts on Snapchat's mainstreaming of anonymity/ephemerality a few months ago -- and believe there are huge opportunities out there for people who will go where Facebook/Google won't: http://chrishateswriting.com/post/67378144174/ephemerality-g...
I'm sure he's petrified of Facebook becoming being widely thought of as a for-profit arm of the US intelligence service. They don't have many more possible users in the US, Facebook needs foreign users or it will stop growing (which would be devastating to a company currently valued at 20x revenue). Facebook needs anonymity to work or the company's future is very uncertain.
That may be a factor, but an equal or greater concern is the threat of losing the young: teens through twentysomethings.
A single, merged, adult-centric identity visible to parents/mentors/distant-acquaintances/professional-colleagues is especially unattractive to this key demographic.
I would argue that the Circles system was fairly innovative when it launched, but needed polishing and a better UI so as to be less confusing for users.
The closest thing I can think of is an email client's "send as". Apart from that I've seen some phone apps and browser extensions that focus on helping you manage multiple accounts on a given service, like Reddit or Twitter.
Thank you very much for your input. Looks like a lot of people have this kind of needs. Usually I have to create multiple email accounts to have multiple roles of me. I'll do some research on SnapChat, but why do it like it? That's for kids.
G+ Circles was basically just a slicker implementation of LiveJournal friends groups, which have been around since before FaceBook.
LiveJournal really doesn't get the credit it deserves for doing so much of what we'd now call 'social media' - and learning how to do it reasonably well - before the bigger players moved in.
I suspect that it was bought by a non-US company plays a large part in the lack of recognition - outside of 'Soviet Russia' jokes, it doesn't really fit the dominant narrative to have an innovative company not be American.
(Even if all the innovation was actually driven by the American user base and development teams.)
Thank you very much. I've been annoyed by these extremely uninformative titles on HN for quite a long time already and now, finally, culmination — article as uninformative as its title. Oh my…
Anyway, it seems that nothing actually happened. Somebody was naive enough to believe that company thats power is in ability to show right ads because of knowing oh-so-much about you can possibly stop worrying about who you are at all. Well, fine. I guess all of it could be shortened to "Moot is dreaming".
We're long past due for a free and open-source tool for managing one's own identity on the public networks.
When we go out into the world, we dress ourselves in a manner befitting the way we want the world to perceive us. For a decade, Facebook has been mandating that we can only wear one hat, ever, and never any masks, and services like Google+ have followed suit.
While I'm glad that Zuckerberg has finally admitted that one might want to change hats or put on a mask, I don't think it would be wise to just leave it all up to him, or any other person that has no vested interest in your online identity. It has to be something no one else can control but you.
Facebook and Google+ both have a "Page" feature that is a non-person that you can post on behalf of. It seems that this is a reasonable multi-identity solution.
That is common to all systems that involve publication. It's no more a disadvantage than saying something before a crowd out in public. You can disavow saying it all you like, but someone is probably going to remember what really happened regardless.
At least if you say it while wearing a mask of pseudonymity or anonymity, you can shed the identity itself and grow another. And if you choose to defame homosexuals, people could look to see if you were wearing your corporate CEO hat or your religious zealot hat at the time--or even note that you do, in fact, consider them to be separate hats--before boycotting any chicken sandwich restaurants.
People do erect cubicle walls within their own psyche. Hardly anyone has a monolithic personality that is presented for all possible occasions. Many of the people who do have engaged in a lifelong pursuit of introspective remodeling to get there, as with a Buddhist monk who has trained himself to show equal respect to a homeless drunk as he shows to sober heads of state. Most everybody else would prefer to keep several different personas on file, to be used at need, including the persona that we show to no one at all.
The Facebook strategy to date is only serving the universal public persona. And that's really only suitable when no one on it actually knows anyone else. The instant any two pepole have an actual personal connection, the invasion of their privacy begins.
> And if you choose to defame homosexuals, people could look to see if you were wearing your corporate CEO hat or your religious zealot hat at the time
I am unclear why you write as if this is a good thing. I don't do business with people comfortable trumpeting how horrible they are just because they say "oh I'm only horrible when wearing this hat". I would rather that speech have consequences (particularly when someone is in a position to harm less-privileged groups).
You're connecting the different parts of that person's life without his consent. That is functionally equivalent to telling the parents of a closeted homosexual that he's gay, just because he publicly announced it down at the Manhole. People sometimes wish to present different facades to different people. If you allow for closeted gays, you must logically also allow for CEOs that hold personal opinions contrary to their corporate policy.
There are legitimate reasons why someone would like to compartmentalize different areas of his life.
A doctor might be expected to wash his hands between every patient, but also choose to pick his nose before preparing his own dinner. When the superfluous lab coat comes off, my professional expectations of him as a physician end.
We have done this for centuries, with tokens of office and traditional garb. Kings have their crowns, Popes their grand miters. Judges don robes, and sometimes wigs. Cops wear badges.
Facebook does not allow for this. If you add your boss as a friend, he is connected to your everything. You have to work to separate him from your real friends. If, on the other hand, he were connected to your "corporate peon" role, you could switch him on and off at the... drop of a hat. In fact, he could give you that hat when you get hired, already connected to everyone else in your office. And if you leave that job, you both burn that hat, and he gives one just like it to the next guy.
> If, on the other hand, he were connected to your "corporate peon" role, you could switch him on and off at the... drop of a hat. In fact, he could give you that hat when you get hired, already connected to everyone else in your office. And if you leave that job, you both burn that hat, and he gives one just like it to the next guy.
sounds like good old corporate email/network/IM account.
...which does not integrate at all into the employee's existing social tools. Separate accounts. Separate servers. All managed by the company and not the employee. If you have separate accounts for just work and real life, that's manageable. What happens if you also need separate accounts for church/temple/whatever, kids' sports leagues, civic societies, multiple circles of friends from high school, college, previous jobs, and the like?
It explodes beyond the ability of a human to maintain, and user names and passwords start getting reused.
I already have three separate e-mail addresses just at work, and that's a pain to deal with. I have two different personal e-mail accounts, so the recruiter spam doesn't drown out actual friend communication. I don't necessarily want Apple or Google or Microsoft connecting all those for their own nefarious purposes, but nor do I want to be burdened by the weight of my own requirements.
For some time now I've wanted to port the "--clearsign" feature of gpg to an automagic firefox plugin (and ideally other browsers, too). Not the encryption part - only the signing, as a way of proving that (for example) forum posts were made by the same person.
It was originally intended as a mildly subversive method of getting people to create pubkeys, in the hope that creating a Web Of Trust out of that later would be easier. Despite those very-long-term goals, the signing feature would have been useful on its own. The benefits of a technique like this is that it's 100% in the hands of the person making the posts, even if it doesn't solve some of the usual problems with GPG and the WoT. I think it could be made transparent enough for most people to use, too.
It was somewhat inspired by the "tripcodes" used on by some 4chan-like forums. Ideally, it would have been literal gpg message signing (for compatibility with existing tools), but would have defined a few ways of representing the signed messages, such that you could "sign" a <textarea> on during form submission, with various ways available to sign the text.
For compatibility with existing forums (that might transform "\n" to "<br>", etc, we can sign the text after stripping whitespace, newlines, and HTML tags (and doing the same when verifying), wrapped with
* straight "gpg --clearsign" headers because why not, even if its ugly with the huge "-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED..."
* some sort of VERY truncated form such as a "{@SignedBy: 0xDEADBEEF}" or even just "{@S:DEADBEEF}" or whatever replacing the usual markers, attempting to not annoy people as much.
Or, with minor server assistance that could be advertised as available in a <meta> tag (or even a special class on the <form>):
* the signature itself could be added to an <input type="hidden">, that the server transforms into something like this, with the tag itself becoming the "-----BEGIN..." headers:
This way, posts can be signed ad-hoc, with a new signing key auto-generated as needed (it's trivial to support multiple signing identities). No attempt whatsoever is made to try and VERIFY keys, at least initially. Signing keys are stored by the browser plugin when first seen, and posts checked as needed. Nothing server-side is needed, though with server support posts can be made to look exactly as they do now.
This lets you know that a post is indeed by the same person you saw previously, which has a lot of utility, even if it cannot be shown WHO that person is. It would even work between websites, with no extra work required by anybody. MitM isn't a huge issue, because it would require the person in the middle to intercept 100% of the posts or a discrepancy will be seen by the clients. Key identity doesn't matter, because it is only connecting posts as having a common author, making no claim about WHO that author is.
Extension of this to all the usual GPG features is obviously possible, but is left out not only for simplicity of implementation, but also to keep the tool simple, hopefully avoiding the "...but GPG is too complicated!" problem.
Unfortunately, actually sketching out a spec and implementing a prototype has been... slow. I'm familiar with GPG and firefox extensions only as a user, and trying to read RFC 4880 has used up far more time than expected. sigh
Really wish I had more time and energy for this, as it could solve a lot of problems, and if it caught on, extending it in the obvious ways combined with stuff like FOAF* could remove much of the need for monolithic, walled-garden "social networks". Instead, we would simply have "the internet", but with as much identify-checking as people want to provide.
