How accurately do we represent ourselves online?

Social networking is not just a way to keep in touch with people you already know; it's a way to get to know new people. Sometimes this meeting is entirely electronic and sometimes it might mean looking someone up on Facebook who you recently met in real life.

This has consequences as employers and educators look at Internet profiles to learn more about potential employees and students.

Many might argue that their Facebook profile does not accurately represent them and shouldn't be used by a potential employer to judge character or personality.

So how well do these profiles express who we are?

That's the question the research project called "You just get me" asks.

It is a social networking experiment that assesses how similar or different our opinions of our personalities are from strangers viewing a self-generated profile on the Internet.

This is an interesting question. In Crossing Boundaries: Identity Management and Student/Faculty Relationships on the Facebook Georgia Institute of Technology researchers Hewitt and Forte found many students didn't think professors should be on Facebook:

One student noted that the Facebook “can unfairly skew a
professor's perception of a student in a student environment,”
which indicates that she perceives the Facebook as a place that is “owned” by students as a group.

Offhand, I might agree with her. The majority of photos of me on the website were posted by my peers; photos which are usually unflattering and demonstrate a far higher amount of inebriation than is representative of my time in college.

Youjustgetme.com doesn't test for the influence of a community photo album, but it does demonstrate that for the most part, our Internet profiles pretty accurately describe the way we view ourselves.

You must create a profile to view the results or you can view a summary in Joe McCarthy's blog, Gumption.

I may be misrepresenting myself or possess an inaccurate view of my personality, because my profile is receiving evaluations with consistently low accuracy. It would seem people think I am far more organized and conservative than I believe myself to be.

According to the study, it might be because I'm a guy. Women consistently scored higher both in ability to evaluate others' profiles accurately and creating profiles that are evaluated accurately.

Or maybe I just don't want to admit I'm a dirty hippie.

-Robot Crusoe

Wall E non-sequitor

I went to see Wall E with my girlfriend yesterday, and I couldn't help but think that someone at Pixar has been playing Portal; a game included in Valve's Orange Box.

The companion feature, Presto!, revolves around a set of magician's hats that mimic the function of Portal's proprietary "portal gun." Anyone who spent a lot of time playing the game (read: me) probably discovered half of the gags used in the film: throwing an object through a portal to have it hit you when gravity sends it back, using a portal to "catch" a falling player, etc.

I think Portal is one of the most innovative games I've played in a long time and it pleases me to know someone at Pixar probably thinks so too.

-Robot Crusoe

Data Portability

Previously, I discussed the next step in social networking; portable network identities that travel the web. This kind of networking depends on "data portability" and an infrastructure that allows it.

OpenID addresses the problems inherent in current social networking trends online and providing a foundation for data portability.

This video talks about data portability and developing technologies.

The accompanying article addresses hurdles to data portability, namely social sites like Facebook that claim ownership of all information that appears on their websites.

Data portability is the first step in establishing universal network identities. For example, if I logged into Open Social as Robot Crusoe; any website that I interacted with and anyone I interacted with on those websites would know me as Robot Crusoe and all the associated information I provided about myself. My on-line experience would be streamlined and I could take advantage of any networks without the need to create a new identity.

A side-effect of this experience is a degree of social accountability; which I discussed a few posts ago. If I rip someone off as Robot Crusoe on EBay then it would not only negatively impact my reputation there, but potentially other sites where someone might be interested in that information. Griefing someone in one on-line game could mean players in another might ostracise me. I would also be subject to social pressures; with a universal Internet identity comes a reputation that I may attempt to control by censoring the content that I share.

This will undoubtedly raise privacy concerns; Internet users are used to anonymity and may not take to greater social accountability.

I believe it will take an initiative as large as Google's Open Social to break the consolidated social networking paradigm. Whether Facebook will adapt and survive the transition remains to be seen.

-Robot Crusoe

Footprints in Cyberspace

All eyes are on Google as a court order to hand over personal information on its users has many concerned about privacy infringement.

Viacom claims that the data is necessary to the 1 billion dollar copyright infringement case against Youtube (a company owned by Google.)

This begs the question as to why Google was holding on to the data in the first place; which couldn't be compromised via court order if it wasn't stored.

Orin Huirvitz discusses and criticizes Google's privacy policy here.

As we streamline media use and integrate it with social networking; we leave a larger and more precise footprint in cyberspace.

One of the inherent advantages of the Internet; being able to track and quantify everything; becomes an issue of privacy.

Everything we look at and even how long we look at it can be tracked to the second. A company called Tacoda even tracks where your mouse goes on a given website. (If you want to opt-out of their data collection you can choose to do so here.)

User privacy is a big deal; I remember when AOL made user data available to the public...for no reason.

As legislators, judges, and lawyers sort through everything, it is probably worth your time to carefully read the statement of user privacy the next time you sign up for anything online.

-Robot Crusoe