Social Software, Identity, & Reputation

Read/Write Web reports that the news has been filled with reports about social software. It cites Apple's new social software push, Facebook's open APIs, Microsoft's enabling user-created Xbox 360 games, the growth of online video, the prospect of Internet-based TV, XuQa combining social networking with games, Yahoo making its Answers API available, the BBC talking about "liberating" its content, and Comcast having "Yahoo-size ambitions" on the Internet.

If you're concerned with the future of identity and reputation online, all these events and a host of others all point to the same thing: a rich social environment online where both identity and reputation require managing for the convenience and privacy of all of us.

• There must be an end to the apparently ceaseless creation of username/password pairs--at once insecure, irritating, and inefficient.
• There should be an end to the constant demands for our personal information--from name and address and phone number to credit card numbers--for the most trivial transactions.
• And there should be a way for us all to manage all the data that we create about ourselves, that is gathered about us, that others contribute about us in various way.

There is also the question of privacy. The richer the social environment and the more intensive our interactions with it, the less privacy we will have. We can possibly defend ourselves against some loss of privacy if we have ways to control:

• To whom we expose ourselves,
• What information we expose
• What names (or pseudonyms--a constant theme of this blog) we attach to our information

Perhaps the growth of social networks can serve as a driver for all these developments.