Why I’m Not Using Facebook Connect
I’ve got a pretty public profile these days. You can find me on this blog of course, plus here (Facebook), here (LinkedIn), and here (Twitter). I’ve cultivated all these public profiles over the past 2-3 years. The reason I spend so much time doing this is for the same reasons most people do: reach out to friends, make professional contacts, keep up-to-date with the industry, create a personal brand, and (previously) job seek.
This is what I tell all my friends who haven’t quite crossed the chasm yet. Though most I know – and this seems to be true for the general public – aren’t comfortable having such public personas. Most are willing to share and comment, but not yet produce and curate.
I’ve been thinking more about our online identities recently, especially in light of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent comments on evolving social norms. While Facebook has an obvious interest in reducing privacy and creating a more open platform, it’s true that high schoolers today are growing up in an age where most of what they consume and communicate is online. We’re true to ourselves (generally) when we interact with people in our physical world, and this is mimicked to an increasingly large extent in our digital world. Some of us are already comfortable being ourselves online. In fact, we seek that authenticity, those honest interactions, and real human-to-human relationships in our everyday online activities.
In real life we can craft different personas in different environments. At the very least, there’s the “work” Christine, the “home” Christine, the “social” Christine.
Online, there’s the “public” Christine – which to date includes articles I’ve written, my blog, my Twitter/Linkedin profile, and public information on my Facebook page. Then there’s the private Christine – the rest of the information on my Facebook.
And that’s how I like to keep it. Online, we need both our public and our private personas.
Meanwhile, it sounds as if Zuckerberg and Facebook are heading in a different direction: “We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.”
While I agree that social norms are evolving, there’s always going to be a desire for people to keep some information private – that’s definitely the “home” Christine and to a large part the “social” Christine. This is why Facebook took off in the first place – it was a closed network of university students who felt safe sharing their personas with peers.
Recently I made my Facebook settings even more private. I also removed dozens of fan pages I had joined, recognizing that the affiliation was part of my public online identity. I’ve also stopped using Facebook Connect, despite its promise that users “take their Facebook identity, network, and privacy settings with them as they browse and interact with the rest of the Web.” Read their terms of service, as well as this earlier ReadWriteWeb article and this more recent CNET article to understand more.
Meanwhile, I’ll continue to blog and send out Tweets – these are facets of my identity that I opted in to make public. I’ve already noticed sites using a “Twitter Connect,” and this is a feature I’ll gladly use (if only OpenID had taken off). And, it appears that we’ll be seeing a lot more of “Twitter Connect” in 2010.
