Some crazy stuff has been going on in recent weeks regarding online identities and social networking.
First, FaceBook “opened up”, then MySpace and LinkedIn announced that they’re following the lead. Most recently, Plaxo launched Pulse, and Brad Fitzpatrick released his manifesto.
Its kind of weird seeing all this happen from the perch of Team FindMeOn HQ. We expected the world would move in this direction one day, but just amazed at how soon its happening.
When we launched in August as privacy minded service offering “Centralized Identity Management” , people asked “why would that be better than a centralized identity?” By March the blogosphere and some top internet icons were publicly decrying the proliferation of the new crop of identity aggregators, pointing out the pitfalls of a work world colliding with a personal life. It was humbling moment as we read icons we long admired reiterating our arguments– and often sounding like our early marketing materials.
In October we first started meeting with some VCs. A very famous investor (who I won’t name) looked at me and said “I don’t see why anyone would use something like this.” By February - well after we launched and filed our patents - we had 3 direct and partial clones of the system, who had raised 48MM in capital.
In November we started on the speaking circuit, but few people were into the idea of open social networks. We even tried to get the MicroFormats group to work with us on getting the OpenSN format up to their specs — they weren’t interested ( in fact, I got a lot of really offensive emails for even considering to attempt such a task ).
And now things have flipped — everyone wants open platforms, open ids and open social networks. Everyone claims they have the best answer to the solution, but offer simple band-aids that create new problems instead of solving exsiting ones.
I can’t go into the exact details of why the FMO relaunch is better, as its all a trade secret until our relaunch. But I will go the low-route and critique all of the existing systems.
1) Open Platforms
The Open Platforms I keep seeing don’t really fit our definition of open — they just allow developers to lease users from established networks. There is no conversion of users from one group to another, the platforms only have certain things open, and its very clear that the operators want to convert and retain every person in the world to their network. Open Platforms are actually “Limited APIs” - but the name doesn’t sound good in marketing buzz. I think an appropriate summation would be: You can call it Firefox if you want, but it looks a whole lot like internet explorer to me.
2) OpenID ( And other forms of centralized identities )
As a preface… we love OpenID as a concept and as part of a greater solution.
Centralized Identities are simply not acceptable as a standalone solution, and it is wholly improper to advocate them as such. Centralized Identities create far too much linkage between accounts - conflating a person’s work life with their personal lives, and other facets of their meta-identities.
Think of your normal day-to-day activities — who you talk to, what you talk to them about, how you act around them. If you’re anything like a normal person, you act differently around different people and different environments. I’m repeatedly using the word different on purpose. This is somethign that people forget, and shouldn’t. You don’t always act the same or share the same info with others. You probably even hide certain parts of your life or personality from people.
If you act like that in real life, why would you do differently online ?
You wouldn’t, and you shouldn’t.
A centralized identity ties every aspect of your life together. A centralized identity management system , like the FindMeOn platform, ties aspects of your life together with granular privacy that you control. A centralized identity management system, like FindMeOn, lets you interact with others online just as you would offline.
3) Open Social Networks
The current push for “Open Social Networking” has been earnest in attempt, but downright terrifying in designs.
Advocates have conflated the want for simplicity and user-ownership of relations and data with the need for relationship specific types of linkage.
The typical advocate of open social networking argues this:
i) I’m friends with Adam on MySpace and on Flickr.
ii) An open social network will store my relation to Adam, and from there to his identities on MySpace and Flickr.
The problem with that is that I’m not friends with the entirety of “Adam”. We are friends through the networks of MySpace and Flickr — but we’re both on FaceBook and LinkedIn, and purposefully not connected on those networks. For whatever reasons, I don’t want Adam to have access to my LinkedIn network. And adam doesn’t want me related to him on FaceBook. More-so, Adam keeps his FaceBook id heavily guarded– he knows a girl who got fired for a raunchy picture of an office-party being on her FaceBook account. Adam doesn’t want anyone to put the pieces together and realize that his FaceBook account is the same person on a Myspace page.
When we designed our Contact Manager and Importer, we tracked and stored relations in their network native format - and spidered out connections from there. We allowed people to share specific views and lens of their online personalities with their friends — and to hide them as well.
Being friends with someone only on MySpace isn’t a data-ownership issue, its a privacy issue. A friendship between myspace.com/abc to myspace.com/def isn’t owned by MySpace, its contextualized to the realm of MySpace. The current attempts at “Open Social Networking” aren’t opening this relationship — they’re removing the privacy it affords.
Summation:
I’m not going to extoll the virtues of the FMO system and how it addresses all of these problems — much of it is still in stealth as we secure funding, and every time we’ve launched a feature someone rips it off. So we’re keeping quiet while funding comes through and patents clear.
But I will say this: these popular attempts at “opening up” communities scare the hell out of me. The Open Platforms are clearly attempts to become a new Microsoft. The Open Identities and Networks read incredibly like the much-hated concept of a National ID card — one swipe and everyone knows everything about you: your content, your contacts, your friends.
Perhaps I’m a capitalist partial to the FMO approach, which we’ve been advocating for over a year now. Or perhaps I’m a guy in a tin foil hat. I’d be okay being somewhere between those two.
Attached are screens and a PDF that are essentially the presentation we gave at the May NYC Social Networking Meetup. The real presentation is a 90pg keynote — so I redid it in a shorter version. We’ll be putting the full 90page document up shortly.
Download the Critique as a pdf
