Deep Throat
A few years ago now, in 2005, the world finally learned the identity of Deep Throat. He had remained pseudonymous for over 30 years. Mark Felt came forward himself when he allowed the release of his name in a Vanity Fair article by his attorney. The disclosure was on his terms. He decided to end the secrecy before he died.

This is something that I claim would be impossible in today’s interconnected and recorded world. Are there stories today that are being published where the sources are on “deep background” and the public is clamoring to know the source’s identity?

The Fake Steve Jobs
The Fake Steve Jobs had a good thing going with his blog The Diary of Fake Steve. He was continually witty and received rave reviews for his poking fun at the mystery and aura that is Apple and Steve Jobs, proper. Of course, over time, his identity was revealed by the New York Times to be Dan Lyons. And like Felt, there was a book deal shortly thereafter. The ruse lasted 14 months — much longer than expected.

“I’m stunned that it’s taken this long … I’ve been sort of waiting for this call for months.” — Lyons

He has since taken up the writing as Fake Steve again – and it’s still just as funny – but without the cloud of intrigue as to who would be so bold…

_why the lucky stiff
Yesterday, _why, a fairly well known programmer in the web2.0 space apparently deleted his online presence. This is news, regardless, but what’s more interesting is that “_why” is a pseudonym and so far, we don’t know for whom. He has deleted his accounts, his blogs, his code and for now, the community of programmers and hackers have yet to unearth his identity. The thread at ycombinator seems to be getting close – I suspect it is only a matter of hours before we get some confirmation.

John Resig posted a remarkable eulogy (his word) to _why:

At this moment, _why’s online presence appears to be no more. All of his sites and code are gone. This includes, and is not limited to:

* http://twitter.com/_why
* http://github.com/why
* http://whytheluckystiff.net/
* http://poignantguide.net/
* http://hackety.org/
* http://shoooes.net/
* http://hacketyhack.net/
* http://tryruby.hobix.com/

Two conjectures are common at the moment: His account(s) were hacked and sites taken down or he simply decided to delete his online presence. I personally believe that he did this deliberately and with some amount of forethought.

Still Hidden?
What examples do we have where we still don’t know who is behind a widely-known* piece or body of work? Does it still happen? The timeframe for the ability to remain unknown is correlated with visibility, no doubt.

I’d love to keep a list somewhere…

Teens are not dreaming of portability (like so many adults i meet). They are happy to make new accounts on new sites; they enjoy building out profiles. (Part of this could be that they have a lot more time on their hands.) The idea of taking MySpace material to Facebook when they transition is completely foreign. They’re going to a new site, they want to start over.

While this feeling of ephemerality is not universal amongst teens, it’s far more prevalent than you’d ever see in adult culture and it has some significant implications for design:

• Focusing on “lock-in” will fail with these teens – they don’t care if they lose track of something they put hours into building.
• Teens are not looking for universal anything; that’s far too much of a burden if losing track of things is the norm.
• Paying for an account can help truly engaged teens remember their accounts (i haven’t found any teen who permanently lost their MMO login) but it can also be a strong deterrent for those accustomed to starting over.
• The numbers that people cite concerning accounts created are astoundingly inaccurate and are worthless for talking about usage or unique participants. (added tx to a comment by Rich)

Which led me to the Slashdot article entitled “Social Networks Fatigue Coming?“. The discussion tried very hard to be about standards and consolidation and the coming possibilities for “profile migration” between services. All of this is a rehash of the same old discussions about email federation that happened 20 years ago. Same as the ongoing 10+ years of graphical IM use that has yet to consolidate/decentralize around a standard (Jabber/XMPP playing the leading role of spoiler/hero at this point).

If these social networks are going to settle on some standard set of portable profile data, it will be so watered down that there’s very little incentive for any established player to play along. If this is going to happen, it has to happen from the ground up. But that’s not even the point of this post.

The Slashdot discussion also turned to the projected identity of users who have multiple accounts, abandoned accounts and one-time accounts that were created simply for access to a single group of people. These users do not plan on maintaining the accounts they create. They are predominantly younger, and less concerned with what they did/said yesterday mattering tomorrow.

circletimessquare wrote:

plasticity of identity, the throw away indentity [sic]. it makes sense for teenagers and their psychological development as they grapple with exactly who they are: try on one identity, throw it away, start over. it also means that the generation that grows up with the web from birth will be very used to the idea of identities being disposable, for themselves, and in how others act towards them as well

this opens up new weaknesses in social interaction, and new strengths. in a world where identity theft is a growing menace, why would that matter when your identity is made of mercury anyways? at the same time, how can anyone be trusted in a world where the idea of a solid identity is built on a foundation of sand?

i see weird confluences of unseen consequences coming out of the new plasticity of identity due to how the web works in the generation currently in their teens, making its way into their very psychology. in ways us ancient fossils in our 20s and 30s won’t even understand

“bah, kids these days”

And ScrewMaster replied:

I dunno. “Plasticity of identity” is all well and good until you go try and apply for a mortgage, or manage a career. Plastic people tend to get their attitudes readjusted real fast, when society eventually expects them to go through their stock of alternate personas and pick one.

Besides, young people have always put on different faces, different attitudes, experimenting to see what kind of reaction they provoke. This social-networking fad is nothing more than an extension of the normal social exploration that we all go through. Yes, it may have unexpected effects but there’s a reason why you mostly see young people playing with their profiles like this. It’s because we eventually figure out that, underneath it all, we’re just who we started out to be anyway. At that point most of us drop the pretense. It takes too much effort to maintain.

I think ScrewMaster has said it most clearly – it’s about societal expectations. This shuffling and searching will come to an end for the vast majority of young people using these tools today as soon as they figure out who they are. Outside of the talk (Fred) (danah) about whether these tools will look quaint and silly themselves in a few years – will these young people care what happens to all the footprints they’re leaving behind? Will they hope the sites just go away/offline? Will they actively delete their rotting personal information – information, while no longer true, isn’t exactly false either… ?

Or will they simply pick a public face, run with it – and hope for the best?

Will any of this matter when the hiring managers themselves did the same thing just a few years prior?

I think in large part this is the most obvious answer for the most people…

It takes too much effort to maintain.

Our identities will collapse on themselves, digital and physical, and plasticity as strategy, while available, will be rarely used by the majority of people who conduct any online activity (read: everyone).

The students of the Facebook are currently working through the newfound reality of their complete Facebook activity being front-and-center to all their ‘friends’. The new mini-feed of their activity within Facebook (comments, notes, adding/removing of pictures, friends and groups) is now broadcast to all their friends’ dashboards automatically and without their consent. As of today, there is not an option to remove this functionality either – mini-feed items can only be deleted after the fact.

i love information. i love my friends. i love information about my friends; however, i don’t like everyone knowing information about what my friends and I do. good networking is like good flirting: leave something to the imagination!

There are two views of these mini-feeds:

1) A user looking at their own page sees a reflection of all their friends’ activity within the system for the last couple weeks – a ‘fortnight story’ of their friends’ activities/updates.

2) A user looking at another user’s page will see what that particular user has been up to the last couple weeks – a ‘fortnight story’ for someone else.

I think this move was inevitable and I applaud it. But I’ve got a longer view than someone using the Facebook today. I would be upset if my information was suddenly available like this. I am not sure why they didn’t have a smaller rollout with some feedback testing. I feel they’re going to get burned by public opinion in the days to come.

I agree, this new facebook is ridiculous! It makes me want to remove my account. I don’t want everyone knowing what I am doing at all times…it has become creepy. Please change it back!!

Normal is shifting.

The users of the Facebook were living in a dream world. Of course their activity was being logged – it’s how Facebook became Facebook. It’s just that the users of the site, until today, didn’t expect their information to be aggregated in quite this way – simply because it hadn’t happened before. And I feel sorry for those who have been ‘outed’ by this system and will continue to feel the brunt of these changes in the next few days as the changes propagate and begin to have a ripple effect on behavior within the system.

I don’t want everybody seeing who i friended, whose wall I wrote on, and when I change my relationship status everytime they sign on. This is a total violation of everyones [sic] privacy. We all hate it. If we want to see something about someone, we will go to their profiles our selves.

This information – this activity information – was already public. It was already part of a public discussion that the users were engaged in by being a member of the community. These students were spreading their political views, their personal habits, their class schedules and friendship networks for all to see (well, all within the Facebook). However, they had the luxury of assuming that most of the people looking at them would have to dig for that information themselves. Someone who wanted the aggregated view of a new aquaintance had some work to do. There was some social friction to knowing too much. And this was comforting – to a point. There was a barrier to entry that insulated the students from the reality.

This change brings them kicking and screaming into the light.

I love facebook, I really do, but this “new facebook” is not improved, it’s horrible! I dont want everyone to know what I am always doing! I wonder what we can do to have it changed?

What we’re seeing is the birth pains of a third generation of social networking.

The first generation was email/IM buddy lists. These allowed us to connect and keep track of our people across distance and time in a way that was more efficient and more seamless than ever before. We knew who was on our lists and we managed the connections. Visibility was limited but we were hooked.

The second generation is our current crop led by Friendster and now MySpace/LiveJournal/Facebook. These sites allow for users to keep track of one another and add a layer of visibility that was quite dramatic when first ‘discovered’. Users were very excited about sharing pictures and collecting as many friends as possible because all these were visible to those who were watching. It was like the mall and middle school all over again. To be seen was the thing.

The third generation will expose the history of this visibility. The full history of what you’ve done in the network. A record of how you’ve behaved in the past will be available in the future. This will (and should) affect your behavior and your friend lists and your decision about which pictures to post.

I really don’t care, i think its a bad move to make it default on with no opt out… …i’m just worried that i will be caught in lies… like saying i am busy working on something, add a friend, and have another friend know i was lying to them, because at 7:34pm i was on facebook…

And this is a good thing – as it mirrors the real world. You shouldn’t lie to your friends. As I’ve said before, the real world is a quaint place where actions matter and people remember. It’s also a place where this virtual overlay we’re playing in today will be taken for granted in only a few very short years. The decisions you make online today will, and should, matter tomorrow.

Students of the Facebook… Play hard, but play smart – and know that everyone is watching.

P.S. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that I expect Facebook to make these mini-feeds optional very shortly. The feedback has been very loud. That said, a dose of reality this big is understandably hard to take.

Update: Just over two days later and the first changes are live.  They’ll survive just fine.

The neutrality of this article is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page.George Felix Allen (born March 8, 1952, in Whittier, California) is a Republican United States Senator from Virginia. He is running for re-election in 2006 and has been mentioned as a possible candidate for the Republican nomination in the 2008 Presidential election. He has recently been involved in a number of controversies, most prominently his use of the word “macaca.”

I love that disclaimer at the top. Don’t you? Self deprecation and honesty, and therefore, authority on the matter (and 63 references at the time of this writing).

Earl Mardle is all over this new media thing. He’s hit it out of the park and deserves a pat on the back. The power continues to move down the food chain and we’re seeing the toddler years ahead of us now. The 2008 race will be something quite instructive indeed.

New Media With Fangs

When Jim Webb’s campaign for a Virginia Senate seat assigned a worker to attend all the public events of the incumbent George Felix Allen, they made an extremely shrewd move.Gathering intel on your opponent is SOP, but doing it with a video camera in public was a new wrinkle, and it plainly annoyed, perhaps unnerved Mr Allen, who eventually unloaded on the cameraman. The cameraman’s family came from India, and Allen was careless enough to lift the corner of his racist rug and let out the French racist epithet, Macaca.

Boy was that bad tactics. Not only was his racism immediately available on the net, and eventually in the corporate media who could no longer ignore the gathering furore, as it eventually caught up with the Trent Lott racism thing, but it sent the liberal blogosphere on a “where there’s smoke there’s fire” search of the net.

And now the whole game is rolling out like an anchor chain. Finding the photo of Allen posing with the leading lights of the Council of Conservative Citizens was only the start, Jeffrey Feldman took it further and produced a full scale research article on Allen’s racist connections, with chapter, and verse. Frameshop: Allen’s Political Klanbition

Within days, Allen’s previously strong campaign was in trouble, Webb was within the margin of error in the polls and Allen was steppin and fetchin all over the state, trying to stay out of the firing line and keep intact his former presidential ambitions.

I’ve always said that the net shifts the locus of power and control, it takes it away from the traditional owners and gives it to the wider community. It remembers and it aggregates, and it is merciless. Or as Feldman says in his piece.

In 1996, when George Allen posed for the picture, it was hard to imagine that only ten years later that the circumstances surrounding the photo, plus similar circumstances, would be so widely accessible to people beyond the semi-clandestine membership of the CCC. But now they are.

But it gets worse, because if one republican insider was working the CCC track, there’s a good chance there are others. So now the citizen journalists are researching the CCC itself, looking for the reverse links to the Republican party.

No doubt someone in the CCC will soon wake up to the risks and start cleaning out the website. However, you can bet that someone already has a full copy of the site contents to sift at their leisure. Which is a nasty lesson that ABC TV in the US is learning.

After finding itself in the middle of a storm about a biased and politically motivated “docudrama” on the path to 911, ABC tried to pull down the blog it was running on the programme; mostly because the promotional value was being shredded by very pointed and aggressive comments from those who found the timing and the content to be unacceptable in a supposedly independent media organisation.

If you go to the ABC site right now you’ll find the blog missing, but as with the stoush over the censoring of the NYTimes Ombudsman’s blog, someone already has the copy.

Is it any wonder that the people who have controlled the message, the medium and the money for so long, want to remake the net in their own, previous, image?

Earl gets five points.

Only a dog will be a dog on the internet.

The network effects of distributing and verifying our identity will have dramatic implications on how we interact in our world (both online and offline). I think we’re headed to a time when “online” and “offline” will no longer be different, separable “places”. They’ll come together and just “be” your identity – they’ll be who you are.

Companies went through this roughly ten years ago. We started seeing URLs on television commercials and glossy brochures. They were at the bottom of the Nike commercials and the car commercials. IBM had one. Apple. Smith Barney. We stopped hearing phone numbers on radio spots – they started saying things like dot-com and dot-o-r-g at the end of their 30 seconds. The companies figured out that their public face was moving from their broadcast advertising campaigns and marketing documents to their website.

Consumers began talking about companies in a way that was recordable, searchable, findable, and devastating to those companies who had always existed at or near the edge of consumer ire. These companies lost when there was more feedback introduced into the system. A good thing, nearly everyone agrees in today’s “enlightened” internet world.

Likewise, those companies who played this new game well, had a website, fostered community, encouraged feedback and embraced the technology – many of them flourished. There was global reach available to so many more than before, both big and small. There were conversations that began to happen (cluetrain) and the concept of a difference between “online companies” and “offline companies” began to disappear about five years later. Nearly all companies larger than one or two person operations now have a web presence here in the US. People “get” how this works – they understand that they can research a company/product before purchase – they can shop around and read the reviews. This is empowering to the consumer and cheaper for the companies. The market spoke and ten years have passed. It’s just part of today’s reality. No big deal. It’s hard to imagine shopping without it.

Now, on to individuals.

We will begin to make the same realizations, personally, that the companies made about their own visibility and place in the world. We’ll be realizing our own face to the world, our own identities, are now a conversation, searchable, findable (you are what you post) – and that there are most definitely reviews out there that can be read and analyzed. It is a very flat place. It’s accessible and negligibly free, a powerful combination.

Now, there are great differences between companies and individuals, sure – culturally, financially, legally. The mechanics of how this will all go down will not be the same, but the end result – a consolidation and awareness of the “self” we project – will be identical to what business went through ten years ago. Your social networks will make sure that it’s really hard for you to have a persona online that’s any different from who you are in “real life”. In fact, what I’m saying is that “in real life (IRL)” will be a quaint colloquialism in just a few short years. We’ll look back and laugh at our simplicity of understanding and comprehension for where we were headed. In an always-on, well-connected world, our social dynamics will change a little bit – but not much. We’ve had too many years (all of them) of being social creatures to change much now. Our friends will be our friends and our enemies will be our enemies. No online or offline about it.

Think I’m wrong? Think we’ll be able to keep our groups of friends and affiliations separated from one another? Don’t think you’ll have reviews?

Tell me about it.