Privacy/Identity/ Profiles: Open or Closed?

Privacy

Several SN services ask you to upload your addressbook, and automatically share it with other users. You may find yourself on someone’s addressbook without knowing this person. There might be someone in your addressbook that you do not know. Privacy is a very serious issue in SNS.

Identity/Profiles

If I am to write my profile, what should I include? What should my profile read like? Do I not need to have a separate profile for separate services, occasions?

Open or Closed

If the SNS is too open, we run into the privacy problems, but if it is too closed, we run into the lack of new friends problem.

Craigslist seems to solve most of the problems simply and elegantly: keep the posters anonymous, let them post whatever they wish: Craigslist, however, is not an SNS!

The Internet and Traditional Media

We have already pointed out that the Internet is quickly emerging as a serious challenge to traditional print media and to TV and radio. This is perhaps what one can take away from the bloggers, the meetups, the SNS that were used in the election campaign for Howard Dean. Eventually, the Internet will impact other spheres as well. SNS is situated in a still neglected periphery (compared to other business conducted on the Internet), but we believe that a serious experiment is taking place: if SNS becomes a tremendous success (ignoring the buzz around SNS), then it would change the way people socialize. That would also mean they would need other kinds of things to socialize.

Users will come to relate to the Internet itself not as a tool, one that can be picked up and put down, but as a space where one meets people. For many users, it already is a place of this sort.

Conclusions

Perhaps a combination of BBS or online forum style posting, a little of blog-style writing, some email, lot of IM features, a little bit of business postings, buying and selling of various kinds, cellphone connectivity; and we will see a convergence of several services and providers. Add a search the web facility, and we could have a presence that will give SNS features as mere add-ons. This presence will necessarily be mainly a business presence, buying and selling (allowing users to buy and sell too). Perhaps only such a combination is sturdy enough to last for more than a few years.

Several technologies, and a few innovations could further reinforce such an entity:
the next level of SN software could toy with the idea of providing a bridge between message-boards or online forums and a way of protecting profiles of users. Let the users post whatever information they want anonymously just like Craiglist, but protect their private network of friends and individual profiles. This open-close method will allow contextual advertising on the site, providing a business model which most of the SN lack today. This also mean a lot more energy and efforts need to be spent in research--especially in better contextual search and text processing—to control Spam and abuse and verify the authenticity of the posting. This method will also keep the charm and serendipitous nature of online interactions intact, rather than just trying to mimic the offline ones.

This convergent method could make for a powerful solution to several problems that currently hamper the development of several segments of SNS.

Social Neworking Software series concluded.

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