Relationships Are The New Identity
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Yesterday morning, I had the pleasure of joining Noah Brier, Johanna Beyenbach, and Clair Hyland from Electric Artists, at PSFK's Good Ideas in Digital panel (you can watch the video here).
When we got onto the topic of Facebook Connect, and the concept of being able to take a single online identity with you wherever you go online, I noticed that we were thinking of "identity" and the network of people we're connected to online as the same thing. When we talked about being able to use our Facebook ID on another website outside of Facebook, we were talking about being able to share our activity or content from that site with our Facebook friends.
Then I read this great post by Helge Tennø (I'm loving his blog, btw), that uses the same construct. He predicts that in the not-too-distant future having a single pervasive digital identity across all environments will be the norm. And that universal identity, combined with geo-location and time referencing, will drive a shift in marketing away from messaging towards utility and service. I agree with his prediction, and I'd say that we're already seeing that shift, e.g. look at how brands are using iPhone apps.
Underlying Tennø's prediction is the implicit notion that our identity is our relationships. That access to this single universal ID means access to your entire network of digital relationships, email contacts, mobile phone contacts, Twitter followers, blog readers, Facebook friends, etc.
This is a hugely significant development in how we think of identity. While the people we knew and spent time around have always been a factor in shaping our identity, only with the rise of internet-enabled social media have our relationships become such a central aspect of how we think about who we are. The factors that have made this possible are that our social network is only now consciously cataloged, searchable, browseable, usually public, and accessible for communication at any instant from any place.
In case you needed any further proof, social media is not just another marketing gimmick.
When we got onto the topic of Facebook Connect, and the concept of being able to take a single online identity with you wherever you go online, I noticed that we were thinking of "identity" and the network of people we're connected to online as the same thing. When we talked about being able to use our Facebook ID on another website outside of Facebook, we were talking about being able to share our activity or content from that site with our Facebook friends.
Then I read this great post by Helge Tennø (I'm loving his blog, btw), that uses the same construct. He predicts that in the not-too-distant future having a single pervasive digital identity across all environments will be the norm. And that universal identity, combined with geo-location and time referencing, will drive a shift in marketing away from messaging towards utility and service. I agree with his prediction, and I'd say that we're already seeing that shift, e.g. look at how brands are using iPhone apps.
Underlying Tennø's prediction is the implicit notion that our identity is our relationships. That access to this single universal ID means access to your entire network of digital relationships, email contacts, mobile phone contacts, Twitter followers, blog readers, Facebook friends, etc.
This is a hugely significant development in how we think of identity. While the people we knew and spent time around have always been a factor in shaping our identity, only with the rise of internet-enabled social media have our relationships become such a central aspect of how we think about who we are. The factors that have made this possible are that our social network is only now consciously cataloged, searchable, browseable, usually public, and accessible for communication at any instant from any place.
In case you needed any further proof, social media is not just another marketing gimmick.
2 Comments:
It will be interesting to see how things play out because at the moment it's not really how Facebook Connect is being used. Basically, companies are using it as an alternative sign-in system that has some spreading properties by having people post to their feed.
You're right. It's barely useful as it is right now; and much more useful to the companies on the publishing/selling side than to us on the people-in-Facebook side.
Hopefully, the uselessness of it in it's current form won't prevent it from ever evolving into something that has real social value to us in the future.
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