OFace - Imagining an Identity Faceting Web Service

In Intended Audience and Social Networks, I wrote about the problem of audience in social networking software. Here’s a strawman solution to this problem.

I imagine several parts:

• FacetSwitch - A device that lets you naturally and quickly indicate your current facets (or intended audiences)
• OFace - An identity faceting service
• A dashboard so that you can review and re-categorize items you’ve published against their current facets
• Extensions to existing systems to utilize this new information

To test out these ideas I will be constructing a web service that will manage your various “facets” of your identity. These facets map to “channels” or audiences which you are writing for.

The FacetSwitch is a webpage, mobile app, or even a dedicated embedded device which has a very simple UI. It displays your currently used facets, your unused facets, and allows you to switch between them.

OFace or OpenFace would be a REST web service for managing mapping OpenIds to URLs. The FacetSwitch would update and read from this service. Additionally the service is used to capture an individual’s facets facet which they were “speaking through” when they created or updated that url. It is orthogonal to existing services and ideally could be layered onto social networking software and other content creation tools either natively via OAuth, or as an extension. Two update modes can be imagined, a “ping” mode where content creation hooks into OFace and a “batch” mode where OFace periodically checks registered feeds and automatically facets items based on timestamp.

A Dashboard would be needed for users to review and correct faceting information as needed, but it would be used infrequently, as faceting should introduce very low overhead for users.

Integration into tools, at least as a prototype, would be via Greasemonkey or another browser addon. There are at least two client side extension points:

When authors create content, then OFace would be notified of the URL being operated on.

When viewers look at content or a feed of content, then they should see a halo or other indication of which facets are in effect and which could be “listened in on”. The content items would be filtered down to only content of interest.

I am thinking of attacking to start exploring these ideas within the domain of lifestreaming applications.

Initially security and privacy aren’t the main focus. It’s more to test the ideas of faceted identity and intended audience.

Intended Audience and Faceted Social Identities

We are heading towards a more transparent society, but at the cost of overloading our readers, duplicating information, and giving up privacy. Social networking software increases this transparency as one is able to digitize more and more of our thoughts and life. Unfortunately most tools don’t have a proper way to manage ones self-identity nor ones social identity; it’s very difficult to get content to it’s target audience without overloading all audiences with unwanted information. Tools have various levels of privacy protection, which are infrequently used.

We currently work around this issue in many ways: ?

• Creating multiple accounts in a service?
• Using multiple services for the same task and tying one username to one target audience?
• Using a shared account for a couple
• Tagging content so that viewers can listen on a specific topic?
• Reposting content to other networks
• ?Etc

The reality of how healthy people operate in social environments is that interaction in the physical world is highly complex and nuanced. We are multi-faceted beasts. At one moment we may be wearing our “Professional Web Dev” hat and the next wearing our “Barack Obama Supporter” hat. In the real world we often make this switches without noticing. We step out of a meeting and into the elevator and without missing a beat are able to "switch these hats". We negotiate social identities constantly for the benefit of our audience. If we communicated in an elevator the way we communicate online, it would be jarring and tedious.

We use Flickr to upload photos for different reasons: family, vacations, parties, work, foodlogs, art projects, political efforts, and supporting other publishing activities. Largely the various audiences and contexts which are the intended recipients are collapsed. Flickr lacks automated features to manage “channels” of audiences. If I upload a whiteboard diagram and a propaganda flyer, both end up in my photo stream. I can try to use tags, groups, or pools, to filter down my photos by audience, but this is labor intensive and may require too much coordination with the audience or other tools in my publishing toolchain. What is needed is a way to make these tools aware of “which hat” we are currently wearing and to only deliver content to the appropriate audience.

If I consume Jane’s activities via FriendFeed or a feed reader, I wanted it pre-filtered for her factes that interest me: Seattle, WebDev, BookReader, and DudeImDrunk. I want to never see some of her other content: ProudMom, SeahawksFan, and MyMusic. This is regardless of which tools Jane uses to author these posts: Flickr, del.icio.us, Twitter, etc.

I think the problem of capturing your current facet is related to other problems with social networking software: Information Overload, Information leaks, and Stalking. It’s possible that solving the faceted social identity problem may be a good foundation for solving the others.

Thanks Ethan for letting me know the feeds to this blog where hosed last week. This is fixed, but some Feed Readers like Google Reader may still be caching the bad urls...

If you try and subscribe and it won't work, try adding .

Changes

I am super duper excited to announce that I will be joining the Mozilla webdev team in October. I have been a fan and supporter of Mozilla products like Firefox and Thunderbird since I was just learning about unix and the internet back in Netscape Navigator 3.0 days.

Don't worry I (we) will be staying in Seattle. I'll be part of a team of remote developers.

It is an honor to join this small feisty company who's vision is to push forward an open web that anyone on the planet can use and make their own. It's a corporation and a non-profit foundation which blends contributions from employees, contractors, and most of all volunteers. A large part of why Firefox 3 is a freaking awesome browser is it's community created add-ons and it's localization into something like 30 languages such as ????? or ?? (??).

Add-ons is a project supported by the webdev team. Some of my favorite add-ons are GreaseMonkey, It's All Text!, and Firebug. GreaseMonkey allows users to "fix the web" without waiting for websites to make the fixes. A new project, Ubiquity, shows potential to make this even easier. It promise is to allow anyone that knows JavaScript to create new browser features from mashed up services, in a way that is more rapid and transparent to the developer.

Another benefit of working for Mozilla will be more openness and transparency. Everything Mozilla does is in the public eye and to serve the benefits of the community. I look forward to being more active in open source projects and participating more in building the shared web.

Hopefully before I start in October, I will be revamping some aspects of my web publishing thingamajiggs; putting out more frequent updates, besides what I have been eating.

Another change, is that this fall I will be starting a thesis project, as I am slowly coming to the end of my Masters program. I will probably be working on improving social identity features in web applications ( social networking software ). So lots of changes all around.

There is a Spore DRM protest going on. 1,962 people have given the game 1 star out of 5. I find this hilarious.

The gaming, movie, and music industries all have a horrible record with locking users out of their purchases. The are being "penny wise and pound foolish". Spore, according to the hype, interviews, and talks I have seen, is an amazing piece of art. It, like every breakthrough piece of art, has the potential to enter our collective culture, like Super Mario Bros or pong did.

Unfortunately, locking down these creations and eliminating chances for fair use, reduces the audience for your works. Greed kills that potential. The are a lot of video game fanatics. The average person will pay for a video game, but the fanatic will not only pay $50 bucks for the game, they will buy the t-shirts, the strategy guides, and the lunch box. Sure lots of kids with free time will go through the pain of finding and pirating video games, but that's why we have kids. Piracy is marketing, not lost revenue.

When I started being able to purchase mp3s more easily than buying CDs and ripping them, I bought a bitch-pile more digital music. I rarely purchase Movies and TV show, because I know that I am really only "renting" them due to DRM issues. I will really only purchase DRM video games for proprietary platforms: iPhone, Wii, etc. I don't notice the DRM there because it's a long lived platform, so I feel like I really own the game.

But will I go out and plunk down $50 bucks for Spore. Naw, the world is to fascinating and their is to much to do and create, to rent a game for $49.99.