Terrell Russell: This Old Network

Blogs are interesting things. They’ve given an inexpensive publishing voice to the masses and they’ve allowed us to watch individuals grow and learn over time. We’re able to see, through language, who someone is without ever meeting them in the ‘real world’. Not unlike books and magazines and every other publishing medium, without the heavy infrastructure and editing overhead of these older industries.

In addition to being insightful in their own right, Eliazar Parra has posted about how blogs are comics and wikis are movies…

Then the blogs started to appear. It took a while to notice anything had changed. The diary metaphor obscured as much as it enlightened. With some hindsight it’s easy to pinpoint what happened—and to marvel at how simple yet radical a change it was. The blog era is when websites learned about sequence, spatial sequence. They stopped being fractal trees of buried content and became, yes, comics—post became the new panel.

He then points out how the sequence of individual posts are what tell the true story, the shifting of space and the filling in of the ‘rest’ by the reader are what give blogs their interestingness.

And then there’s sequence. Sequence brought context, interface and development to websites, it gave them personality, motion, and tension, made them subject to change and thus to evolution. Sequence brought time.

Every page in a blog has a natural context: it comes after the previous post and before the next. A blog’s homepage is simply a broad sweep of the most recent panels posts in the strip—an easy way to glimpse the website’s personality and recent happenings. If you’re faithful (or diligent), you can see the writing and the themes evolve through time. The mind fills in the gaps, the bleeds, and the continuity that emerges can feel as real and intense as reality itself. Spatial interface is a brilliant interface in its almost ridiculous simplicity.

What we write says a lot about who we are – and don’t think for a second that the signaling we’re doing with this new medium isn’t solidifying our identities in the world. For good or bad – what we write is who we are. And the longer and more we write, the richer that picture (comic strip, perhaps) becomes.

When reading someone’s blog, reflect on the things that aren’t written as much as the things that are. Reflect on what isn’t shown, on what isn’t laid bare.

And then reflect on your own. What is it that we say to the world? And then, again, when we don’t say a thing?

Tags: blogs - identity

danah boyd seems to be stirring up discussion again…

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).

Tags: consolidation - identity

Personal Risk Assessment and Management was another thread of the Reputation discussion last week at the IIW2006 that also appeared at the UNC Social Software Symposium. A sense that every decision we make balances on a complex dance of calculations in a complex personal formula: risk associations with the actions we’re about to take, benefit associations with the value we’ll derive from them. It was a part of the identity and reputation discussion for two reasons: the persistance of our digital selves (ephemeral permanence (Thanks Dr. Barreau)) as well as the everpresent searchability of these recorded digital facts and footprints. It was part of the social network and tagging discussion for the same reasons.

It’s related to our newfound need of navigating these new digital spaces with these new rules – but it’s also related to our ability to calculate well.

And how bad we are at calculating things well.

A couple weeks ago, Jeffrey Kluger wrote in Time:

Shadowed by peril as we are, you would think we’d get pretty good at distinguishing the risks likeliest to do us in from the ones that are statistical long shots. But you would be wrong. We agonize over avian flu, which to date has killed precisely no one in the U.S., but have to be cajoled into getting vaccinated for the common flu, which contributes to the deaths of 36,000 Americans each year. We wring our hands over the mad cow pathogen that might be (but almost certainly isn’t) in our hamburger and worry far less about the cholesterol that contributes to the heart disease that kills 700,000 of us annually.

We pride ourselves on being the only species that understands the concept of risk, yet we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones.

And then he begins to talk about the lizard brain and it’s very oldness as the reason we don’t do our math very well.

Part of the problem we have with evaluating risk, scientists say, is that we’re moving through the modern world with what is, in many respects, a prehistoric brain. We may think we’ve grown accustomed to living in a predator-free environment in which most of the dangers of the wild have been driven away or fenced off, but our central nervous system–evolving at a glacial pace–hasn’t got the message.

To probe the risk-assessment mechanisms of the human mind, Joseph LeDoux, a professor of neuroscience at New York University and the author of The Emotional Brain, studies fear pathways in laboratory animals. He explains that the jumpiest part of the brain–of mouse and man–is the amygdala, a primitive, almond-shaped clump of tissue that sits just above the brainstem. When you spot potential danger–a stick in the grass that may be a snake, a shadow around a corner that could be a mugger–it’s the amygdala that reacts the most dramatically, triggering the fight-or-flight reaction that pumps adrenaline and other hormones into your bloodstream.

…

“There are two systems for analyzing risk: an automatic, intuitive system and a more thoughtful analysis,” says Paul Slovic, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. “Our perception of risk lives largely in our feelings, so most of the time we’re operating on system No. 1.”

We have trouble keeping statistics in the land of cold hard facts. Our ability to predict the future is notably poor as well. We have a pretty innate mistrust of statistics as they can be thrown at us with remarkable bias (and the fact that we have no sense of the very big or the very small). Given all these and our biological leaning towards making gut reactions – it does beg the question of how well we’ll deal with always-on, always-connected, personal information online.

How will we cope with having our lists of “friends” available to everyone? How will we cope with our poor decisions following us around for extended periods – potentially affecting others’ decisions about us without us ever knowing? That job offer you didn’t get a callback for? Was it because of those FaceBook pictures archived from 15 years ago? That email you sent (and got forwarded) before you breathed and counted to 10 (or 100) like Mom always used to say? You’ll probably never know. And therefore, your calculations are probably off anyways.

As we move forward, this personal risk management will need augmentation. It will move down to earth from the high flying hedge funds and the rest of the banking and finance industry. Individuals will get better tools for balancing their future costs.

And we’ll still be royally bad at it.

Since reputation and identity management are social phenomenons, at best we can help people make some of their decisions with some real facts – but when it comes down to it, they’ll probably still be thinking with their lizard brains.

Update: And soon after posting this I found a very reasonable rant against how we’re teaching a nation of students to think math is hard – and how that is dangerous.

Abbas Raza writes in “Aptitude Schmaptitude!”:

The way I see it, there was a one-two cultural punch which has knocked out numeracy in this country: first, there was a devaluing of mathematical competence in and by pop-culture; second, justification was provided for not learning mathematics to those already disinclined to do so by the devaluation. That’s it. The rest of this column is an attempt to flesh this out a little bit.

Tags: iiw2006 - lizardbrain - risk management - statistics

I’m here at the Internet Identity Workshop and have been having a number of great conversations. The quality of the discussions is high and the number of demos is remarkable. Only seven months ago when I was in Mountain View for the earlier IIW2006, there were a couple demos of near-working implementations and a lot of excitement about what the next few months were going to unleash as these systems started to come online. It’s also when the idea was first hatched to bake OpenID into claimID. So long ago.

A great many things have happened since then. Higgins is now demoing live open source implementations of a variety of tools, including Bandit, around the newly announced OpenID 2.0 spec. We have full OpenID 1.1 libraries in all the major programming languages. OpenID 2.0 code should be rolling out within a couple weeks from a number of the vendors here. Dick Hardt of Sxip demoed the newly announced Sxipper Firefox plugin. There was a Safari InfoCard Selector demo complete with modal overlays. There were a surprising number of demos (Java, even) fully functioning with versions of Microsoft’s CardSpace (coming baked into every copy of Vista in a few short months). Avery Glasser of VxV Solutions demoed his company’s voiceprint technology fully integrated and interoperable with OpenID. JanRain demoed their new BotBouncer site designed to serve as a centralized CAPTCHA repository so users can know a particular OpenID has passed a humanness test.

I also ran a session this morning on MicroID and how it works as a lightweight verification method for claiming a webpage (and eventually a part of a webpage). I received a variety of questions about SHA1 and it’s being broken back in February of 2005 as well as the MicroID not being a true HMAC. The answers, as best I could describe them, hinge on the fact that these are not true secrets being hashed and passed around for MicroID. We’re only using hashing in the first place to try and obfuscate the email address of the user – not protect any nuclear secrets.

Additionally, Dick Hardt posed a question that forced me to step back and reconsider a couple things about MicroID.

He asked, if you’ve got an OpenID, couldn’t you just use it as the communication identifier itself and skip the hashing step (which exists to obfuscate the email for publication purposes)?

Of course, he’s right about this. If a site has decided they want to play along with all of this fancy identity stuff and expose something which allows others on the internet to verify claims that their users are the same person at a different service, why would they pick to expose MicroID if they could just implement OpenID and expose it instead?

The answer, I think, is mostly that it’s easier to do MicroID today (it’s just a hash). But in the long run, once OpenID is in a lot more places and a lot more visible to everyone online, it will probably be just as easy to simply include a user’s verified OpenID in the head of their page – no hashing – no obfuscation necessary.

Something like this:

<meta name=”openid” value=”http://claimid.com/terrell”>

Then, other sites can simply check to see that they, too, have independently verified that particular OpenID and ‘connect’ the accounts.

Just like MicroID does today.

In fact, I’m proposing here that MicroID be tweaked to include the opportunity to do just this. Declare as part of the spec the publishing standard for publishing OpenIDs as well as MicroIDs for public consumption.

Perhaps claiming a blog comment would be easy if it looked something like this:

<div class=”openid-http://claimid.com/terrell”>

It seems simple enough and allows these simple claims to be made as the technology matures beyond simple email addresses as communication identifier.

MicroID specifies for the first part of its hashing formula to be any communication identifier, but if it’s an OpenID specifically, or i-name, it doesn’t need to be obfuscated and hidden from view.

Thoughts? What am I missing? Are there use cases where someone/someservice would still want to obfuscate the OpenID? Should it ever not be public?

Tags: claimID - iiw - iiw2006b - MicroID - OpenID

David Weinberger relates a story from his recent New Hampshire visit to speak at the Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference:

One teacher said that a parent printed out his daughter’s MySpace page and told her he was going to post it at the mall. When the daughter objected, mortified, the parent explained that MySpace is as public as the mall.

I love this.  Online identity *is* public.

In fact, it’s *more* public, because it’s persistent and searchable.

Kudos to Dad.

Tags: identity - mall - myspace