Control and Freedom

Om Malik’s guest columnist Robert Young in his piece entitled “Can MySpace be Beaten” (yes they can), says:

It’s safe to say that MySpace has essentially captured the entirety of Americas youth. Moreover, these kids have created their own unique MySpace profile pages that are, in turn, rapidly becoming their personalized dashboards to everything that is important to them in their daily lives. Currently, that includes social networks of their online friends, venues to communicate with them, and collections of their favorite music & videos.

But as they mature, and their hunger for new types of information, media, and social connections expand, they will want their dashboards to grow and morph with them, each personalized with only the items that they are individually interested in. At the end of the day, services like MySpace have the rare opportunity to become the ultimate console for consumer control (C3)

I fully agree with this even though the name “console for consumer control” is a bit of a mouthful. We also strongly believe the browser is the best candidate for this console as described by Matt but more importantly that the user’s machine is the best place to store this extensible online identity and the data attached to it.

This ultimately gives users more freedom but also more control over their online representation allowing the same individual to represent himself differently depending on the person looking. Are you a close friend of mine then I’ll share intimate information and a maximum of data with you. Are you a complete stranger then you’ll only have access to my most generic blog entries.

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4 Comments »

1. The ability to filter people using identity-based access controls doesn’t require moving all that data to the browser. This has already been happening for quite some years on Livejournal, and I wouldn’t be surprised if MySpace didn’t already have this implemented.

   There are good reasons to implement these things in the browser, but selective presentation to other users isn’t one of them.

   Selective presentation to the service provider - now THAT’s a good reason. Unfortunately, prohibitions against running servers (whether they’re apache or a server socket on a browser app) and that monster we know as NAT isn’t going to make that easy to do.

   (speaking of which, I’m keenly intersted in how/much you solve the NAT problem in Allpeers).

   Comment by Nato Welch — 3/1/2006 @ 12:03 pm

2. Nato,

   At the end of the day, it makes more sense to have the profile hosted on the user’s machine and shared selectively with providers, as you suggest. Yes, you could outsource your identity to a server-based app like LiveJournal, but this raises all kinds of issues of privacy and control. Also, server-hosted identities can’t be easily leveraged across different servers.

   We “solve” the NAT issue by doing as much as we can to connect machines directly (including STUN-style NAT traversal and TURN-style relaying). This still puts some burden on third-party relays, but our goal it to reduce this to the absolute minimum.

   Comment by Matt — 3/1/2006 @ 1:22 pm

3. For privacy issues, I couldn’t agree more - “hosting” your data on your own computer is far superior.

   Efforts like http://openid.net/ and http://www.sxip.com/ are making inroads toward single identities for multiple servers/services, but I don’t think any of them would be easy to implement in a p2p, client-only model.

   That said, I like what I’m hearing about Allpeers! You might have done it. I’ll look forward to seeing & hacking on it.

   Comment by Nato Welch — 3/2/2006 @ 10:17 pm

4. Interesting thread. It seems that the next “hot” gathering will be around the best environment that offers relevant presentations to the individual’s different social groups. Myspace is a one-size-fits-all proposal. The ability to quickly adapt a presentation to a mood in a particular social circle would be attractive as well.

   My interest in AllPeers was as a sharing tool, mostly for a modest art business, not necessarily as a social environment, but I’m intrigued.

   great blog -

   oldman

   Comment by oldman — 3/3/2006 @ 5:14 am

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