carolstimmel.net

Based on the fact that Plaxo is one of the first to integrate with Google’s Social Graph API, I spent a few hours (yes a few hours) familiarizing myself with Plaxo Pulse and littering my associates’ inboxes with more detritus about “getting connected.” I even went so far as to install the sync tool onto my Mac Desktop (coming off as soon as I’m done here). With the Social Graph integration, the public profile pages in Pulse server now sport what Plaxo is calling their “unified public profile.”

Using Google’s API, Plaxo is able to gather up URLs across the net that belong to you and then pump them into your Plaxo stream. The hope is that your “online actions” will not get trapped in just one network, by being able to share across them. I can’t help but think of detritus. Dictionary.com defines “detritus” as any fragments separated from the body to which they belonged; any product of disintegration. My first response was seeing a prolific twittermate’s tweets strewn across my pulse page and thinking in the most ungodly manner, that not only was I going to have to look at the tweets on my desktop, facebook and phone, but now they were included in an online networking site. Yes, this is definitely decaying organic matter.

Lifestreaming across the Internet just because you can seems like the next flame-out. And once people realized what they have signed up for, it will be like the first time you googled your name and found out that that personal post you made in a forum was now inextricably linked to you, for all to see. I predict that people will begin to be much more judicious in how they engage online and will choose only a few services from which to join the conversation.

Plaxo could be that choice for some professionals who want to feel like they are using Facebook, but really what Plaxo is good at is managing your address book. Either way, the boundaries of the online conversation have yet to be defined, and to Plaxo’s credit they want to remain relevant and participate in that conversation. The question is, how long will this be interesting and when does it cross the line into irritating?

In social and dramatic circles, reflexivity describes an act of self-reference wherein an act of examination itself affects the antecedent.  Robert Merton described this as “Self-Fulling Prophecy”: once a prediction is made, people will behave in a manner that ultimately causes the statement to be true.  Think of it this way, an artwork itself means nothing without the audience itself.

And in the online world, we are the subject and object of our very own discourse. We create and affect our creations both explicitly and then consume them in every-varying contexts.  In almost every scenario where we are actively engaged in our persona management, facebook, myspace or linkedin, we create our own stage of persona which informs us about ourselves.  Furthermore, our persona is in turn affected by its examination by and intermingling with other members of the network itself.

Your online persona goes a long way to defining you in the first world. Seventy-seven percent of recruiters say the have checked a candidate online, according to the Boston Globe. Thirty-five percent have eliminated a candidate based on what they found. Managing your online reputation is unavoidable in 2008; many companies already do this with the use of such tools like Collective Intellect’s Media Intellect, in Real-Time. Individual user’s also need some way to obtain intelligence about their online persona that goes beyond googling an individual name.  Your name is your brand and it should be treated with as much care as Coca-Cola treats their brand.As an expert witness in a copyright theft case, my brand was googled and a paper I had written while working in a Research and Development environment was produced by the Defendant.  The context that I wrote that paper in was completely lost and I spent over an hour fielding questions about what I meant in that paper and how it impacted my thinking almost 10 years later.  A total Red Herring in this case on the part of the Defendant, but a great example that shows how with deep indexing of sites and their content, we are beholden to the first 2 pages of a search on our name.  What happens when employers, colleges and others start digging deeper into Social Networks and other niche sites looking at you.  Oh right, that already happens.Social Network aggregators can go the distance in helping you see what your current activity stream looks like to other’s in a near real-time perspective, but for now it doesn’t let you do much with the data, dig historically into the data or manage it.  The horizon of new social media requires this ability.

Hunker down to read the slightly dated A Privacy Paradox: Social Networking in the United States; another First Monday publication. Author Susan Barnes discusses private vs. public space and social networking privacy issues.

I first encountered the Privacy Paradox while doing consulting work with eBay. eBay was facing the “walled-garden” challenge; wherein users would transfer monies, sometimes substantial amounts, to complete strangers in remote countries like Absurdistan, being defrauded in the process. What was functioning, was the belief that since everyone was an eBay member, that they were somehow a vetted and trustworthy participant in the transaction.

Barnes observes a similar function within social networks where members, teenagers in this case, give away extensive personally identifiable information in order to participate in electronically-mediated relationship building.  The Internet is described - as it has been from other sources - as a panopticon; an architectural construct wherein prisoners can be observed and thus behavior is influenced by the very notion that it may be seen.  And therein lies the rub of social networking sites: A certain amount of personally-identifying information must be provided to engage, yet participants are unaware of the panopticon they are trapped in and believe that as long as their parents aren’t reading their profiles, they are private.

Given the disparity in frontal lobe growth between an adult and a teenager, I can fully believe this to be a realistic analysis.  However, with the meteoric growth of social networks, especially niche networks (i.e. Recovering Alcoholics, Dog Lovers, …) and the willingness of the over 21-40-crowd to dabble, I believe the opposite phenomenon is occurring.  Nano-blogging sites, such as Twitter, anecdotally show one of two blogging variants - 1) isn’t my life exciting! and 2) I just did x and I feel y about it (yawn) and the fear of lost-privacy has been completely broken down.  Simply by pounding out 140-characters and hitting send, our naturally ego-centric personalities receive their much-needed balm - no matter what the cost.

Such systems chew away at our beliefs that individual autonomy is of significant meaning anymore.  After all, isn’t privacy about individual autonomy and the maintenance of personal integrity?  Perhaps the Privacy Paradox isn’t such a paradox anymore.  When Jane blogs about a weekend of drinking and debauchery when she’s babysitting Johnny, well, then Internet content becomes shit on a shingle.  The abuse of personally identifiable information remains a significant concern, but please remember, the check’s in the mail.

While publishing my online persona through Facebook, MySpace, Plazes or on this blog is now insanely easy through available technology that the question is no longer can I, but how out of control can this experience get?

First off, keeping track of all these sources is a blown deal for me, right from the beginning. I won’t do it, and I can’t do it. Spending my every waking moment traveling from source to source gets cumbersome, even with the beckoning to update my status.

The only true status I reliably provide is through my twitter stream because I can do it from my desktop and from my phone. And even that is not a guarantee. Using my Flock browser on with the people bar running, I can also update my facebook status (I haven’t yet begun to use SMS to update facebook yet). However, being an employee and fan of Me.dium, I tend to run the Me.dium sidebar exclusively prohibiting the use of the use of the people bar.

So, I chose to use my blog to publish all my sources, but how can I keep my sources easily updated? Obviously, all these social networks arent’ helping to keep me organized in anyway, but tend to provide an incidental look at my online activities. I want access to an aggregator that not only allows me to see my activity stream (actually, I already know what I have been doing), but allow me to interact with the items in the stream.

So far, I have tried SocialURL, Profilactic and Spokeo and am left feeling like these products are glorified RSS publishers with slick Web 2.0 interfaces. In fact, the closest I’ve come to what I’m looking for is Jared Polis’ Fuser, like Me.dium, another Boulder, Colorado startup.

It has taken awhile for me to be able to even test Fuser, because it has been so buggy. Yes, it’s in it’s Beta phase, but I couldn’t even use it. In fact, it’s still fairly buggy now and the interface is wanting, but I can see that they are moving in a unique direction from a simple aggregator by allowing you to access and interact with your network (only Facebook and MySpace right now) data complete with profile data. I’ll keep trying to use it, and hopefully there is velocity behind their development team, because my curiousity is piqued.