August 08, 2003
It's about personas, not about identities
There's an important aspect about social software that a lot of folks seem to be missing. It's the idea of a persona. This is different than an identity. Basically, a user might provide a foaf file to share a work persona as http://example.com/foaf/work/joe.rdf. But then also turn around and use an entirely different persona to represent, let's say, a sports-oriented persona as http://example.com/foaf/sports/joe.rdf. (ignore the use of the same domain name here, example.com is a known safe one for fake URLs).
The idea here is that what Joe's work persona might have to say could well be entirely different from the one for sports. In fact, unless both files made statements linking to the other there'd be no real reason to even see them as even being related to each other.
The trouble is, most software makes it extremely tedious to shift back and forth between them. But until software starts handling these concepts better the users don't know any better. As I often say, "chicken, meet egg."
If you're a developer, ask yourself, what about my product would lend itself to helping the users transition, smoothly, between being Joe the wage slave to Joe the fantasy football fanatic? This is what Joe User wants. It's about time you started listening.
