Constructed Identity

A few hundred million is a steal for your identity, they’ve got plenty of money.

Microsoft and Facebook are in partnership, but what’s at stake? Three things:

1) Facebook knows who you are: your name, your gender, where you live, your martial and political status, sexual preference, age, where you work, the list goes on. The funny thing is, you’ve voluntarily given that information up.

2) The Graph: They also know who you connect to, who you talk to, and what you say to them (you don’t own those private message ya know).

3) Gestures: Sure, up to one third of all profile information is bogus, but what about those unsaid gestures: What people do is more important than what they say. What apps you use, how frequent, what and who you click on.

Great, but why does it matter? Because the new partner likely will have access to this very precious data.

[We once rejected Microsoft’s Passport identity campaign, but we’ve potentially and unknowingly just handed it over]

Are they mining this information? With Facebook being a company of about 700 folks, it’s hard to imagine that they will. Their new advertising partner, (experienced pros) have the tools, process, and sophistication to do this.

Does Microsoft have access to all this information in day two after the deal? Not likely. But will they? Here’s a few reasons why it makes sense: Advertisers are all about margins and accuracy, the more accurate the ad, the less waste and more efficient the spend is. If Microsoft can target these ads right down to Jane in Santa Clara who is conservative and likely to buy X gidget then it could work.

How else can the data be used? For Marketers there’s a bunch of clever things they can do, if their community is in Facebook, why would you ever have them sign up for a registration form again? Just friend them or create an event page. What if you had the ability to export your network contact list via CSV?

Google still relevant?
What about Google? The killer in online advertising and search. There are millions of people using Google, and yet the Facebook audience is much smaller, and North America focused (for now). What matters is growth curves, it’s taking off near vertically.

[Google sells ads based on keywords, FaceSoft can now sell ads on something far more accurate: people]

What’s the next generation of online advertising look like?
What will these ads look like? At first, it will be the traditional forms we know, the banners, skyscrapers. Then they’ll move closer to the newspage, then the sponsored groups. The biggest untapped opportunity? Microsoft can bring the big name advertisers to the geeky kid in the garage who created that popular food throwing app. Geeky kids lack the sophistication to manage a big name advertising relationship or negotiation, but MS can.

[Don’t be surprised if the popular Food Fight App in Facebook starts to include Chicken McNuggets, Pepsi’s latest drink, and ‘the Big Meaty’ pizza from Domino]

Upside to users
Ads could become very targeted, very relational, and very social, the savvy brands will let go of the ads, and let the control move to the users. We’ll embrace them.

The takeaway
While the internet has rejected ‘forced’ identity systems from big brands, we willingfully (and often unknowingly) hand over incredibly detailed information about our precious identity. We’ve never seen an advertising system as potentially as sophisticated as this one. There’s many opportunities for the web to become more targeted, more accurate, and more relevant, but with that comes the risk of giving up some control.

Harvard’s Berkman center fellow Doc Searls has responded to this post, and gives a very user-focused perspective. He points out that Facebook’s users are not it’s customers, and that we should review the 7 rules of identity. Great to be all user-focused, there’s got to be way where all parties can work and benefit. Movements happen at the consumer level and most are sheep.

Two thoughts.

First, Microsoft had a very instructive failure with Passport, and the “Hailstorm” effort of which it was a part. One guy leading that instruction is Kim Cameron, primary author of the Seven Laws of Identity and creator of the Identity Metasystem concept (among other things), all which we made a cover story in the September 2005 issue of Linux Journal. To the best of my knowledge, that was the first time a Microsoft effort made the cover of the magazine — and it deserved to.

In brief, the Seven Laws are:

1. User Control and Consent
2. Minimal Disclosure for a Constrained Use
3. Justifiable Parties
4. Directed Identity
5. Pluralism of operators and technologies
6. Human integration
7. Consistent experience across contexts

Second, many independent developers at companies and organizations large and small (including many individuals their own) have joined together (guided to a significant degree by Kim and his Laws) as in informal Identity Gang (now a working group of Identity Commons) with the shared purpose of empowering individuals to control their own identity-related information in the networked world. “User-centric identity” is still new, and we’re all still in the early stages of Whatever This Will Be; but already much technical progress has been made, most of it in the form of open source development.

excerpts from….

http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/category/identity/

http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1002828

To exist in the real world, one has a physical body in which is representative of a presence of a being. One which others identify as the same or as different from one of themselves. An identity attached to that physical body in then forms personalities, individuality frame of mind and even life values. Similarly as we focus in on the development of the internet as a medium, it has given us authoritative methods in which we are able to carve a dimensional “space”. Again to exist in this virtual “space” one has a virtual body and a virtual identity to keep in tact a presence over the internet.  The disembodiment of a real self in to a virtual self has aroused public interest for a period of time and even more so as virtual “spaces” over the internet are growing. Yet the journey of defining the virtual entity has driven many researchers to look in to different angles and cross disciplines, it is for certain that internet has redefined the way we perceive ourselves and others.

representingbodiesinvirtualspace

The development of Computer Mediated Communication or C.M.C has pushed the internet realm to the different possibilities of communicating with one another, breaking the barrier of distance, racial and even cultural difference. Communication tools such as MiRC, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, Skype and many more are taking communication from instant to real time space. The evolving cocoon of C.M.C is creating a space in the cyber realm that allows not only communication to take place but also a safe environment both emotionally and the physical body as well. However having said that, in this created space, identities of who we are are also ever-changing due to this occurrence, the dynamics of relationships, the way we communicate, the persona we attach and many more.

Identity Formation in Instant Messaging

social-information-processing-in-muds

10 Things About Conversation in Virtual Worlds…

Although massively multiplayer virtual worlds have made great strides in achieving visual realism (i.e., through detailed 3D models, lighting and physics simulation, motion capture, etc.), they are much less sophisticated in terms of interactional realism, or the simulation of face-to-face interaction. Developers of MMOs are starting to grapple with fundamental questions of how ordinary conversation works as a system and how it should be modeled.

As a player of MMORPGs and virtual worlds, I routinely experience a state of immersion and connection when interacting with other players. However, there are many occasions on which this immersion is broken when the system seems to do the wrong thing. There is some slippage or awkwardness in the interaction that draws attention to the limitations of the system and reminds me that I’m not in a real-life conversation. The following are 10 features of avatar interaction systems that reduce interactional realism, plus 10 tips for increasing it.

Avatars…
1. Stand and do nothing
2. Don’t speak in real time
3. Use telepathy
4. Look the wrong way
5. Stare at each other
6. Hide the player’s gaze
7. Lack free gesticulation
8. Gesture for fixed durations
9. Don’t tightly coordinate gestures and talk
10. Lack usable facial expressions

Avatars could…
1. Display embodied actions
2. Speak in real time
3. Give IM busy signals
4. Look at the speaker
5. Look away when speaking
6. Reveal player’s gaze
7. Gesticulate freely
8. Hold gestures
9. Tightly coordinate gestures and talk
10. Have visible facial expressions

Each of these points are elaborated below.

Avatars…
1. Stand and do nothing: Many ordinary activities–looking through a bag, consulting a map, reading a book, trading items, talking with a friend remotely–are hidden from the public eye. This makes avatars appear lifeless even when the player is quite active. It also makes it difficult for players to manage these private activities with joint activities (e.g., looking through a bag and leaving the scene together with another player).
2. Don’t speak in real time: Text-chat systems in virtual worlds, with the exception of There, hide the composition of a turn from the public eye. As a result, players cannot predictably achieve one-speaker-at-a-time, one-topic-at-a-time, or tight coordination (minimal gap and overlap between turns).
3. Use telepathy: Players can chat with anyone in the world at anytime. At times a player can be bombarded with multiple messages at the same time (“tell hell”). There’s no way for a remote “caller” to know it a recipient is already engaged in a conversation(s).
4. Look the wrong way: Some interaction systems don’t enable avatars to turn their heads semi-independently of their shoulders. Consequently avatars cannot be made to use eye contact in a multiparty conversation in a natural way.
5. Stare at each other: In the better eye gaze systems (e.g., EverQuest II), avatars tend to make eye contact at the right times, but they also tend to stare at each other. (In real life, people stare at each other in order to either threaten or flirt.)
6. Hide the player’s gaze: Most avatar systems enable the player to decouple her view from the avatar’s. The players can zoom out and pan 360-degrees. While this helps mitigate problems with the lack of peripheral vision, it also means that you never know what another player can see or where she is looking. This can make the coordination of gestures difficult.
7. Lack free gesticulation: All avatar systems I’ve seen in games implement gesture by giving players a list (short or long) of pre-defined gestures from which to choose. As a result, some forms of gesture are not possible, such as, those that are used to describe objects by simulating their shape, spatial relationships, and motion (“iconics”). Also, long lists of gestures are hard for players to learn.
8. Gesture for fixed durations: All avatar systems I’ve seen in games limit the duration of the pre-defined gestures to a fixed period. This makes it difficult for players to coordinate gestures with other players. They cannot “hold” a gesture until they can see that the recipient has seen it and has understood.
9. Don’t tightly coordinate gestures and talk: In current avatar gesture systems, most gestures and text chat must be done as separate turns. As a result, gestures cannot be precisely timed to coincide with particular keywords in the chat. While this is not a problem for gestures that can perform an action on their own (“emblems” such as waves, nods, and shrugs), it makes gestures that are dependent on talk for their meaning difficult to perform. These include gestures used for referring or pointing (“deitics”), emphasizing (“beats”), and describing (“iconics”).
10. Lack usable facial expressions: Some avatar systems implement no facial expression at all. Others offer a wide array of facial animations; however, these are often too difficult to see because players tend to zoom out their view. Yet zooming out itself is critical since it is the only way to really know what your avatar is doing.

Interactional realism in current MMOs could be increased by having avatars…
1. Display embodied actions: player opens bag, avatar looks through a bag; player opens map, avatar studies a map…
2. Speak in real time: post chat on a word-by-word or character-by-character basis (There is the model)
3. Give IM busy signals: when player is in a conversation, private messages from new speakers receive an automatic “busy” message
4. Look at the speaker: player clicks on other avatar to establish eye contact (as in Star Wars Galaxies or EverQuest II)
5. Look away when speaking: when typing, avatar looks at recipient(s) only intermittently
6. Reveal player’s gaze: “not looking” indicator appears when player’s view is too divergent from avatar’s
7. Gesticulate freely: real-time motion capture using a camera enables players to use their own bodies to gesticulate freely
8. Hold gestures: player can ‘hold’ a pre-defined gesture by holding down the enter-key upon executing the gesture (user-controlled duration)
9. Tightly coordinate gestures and talk: player can tie a gesture to a particular word in the chat
10. Have visible facial expressions: a close-up view of an avatar’s face appears when selected

For more on the organization of talk, gesture, eye gaze, and facial expression in real-life face-to-face interaction, see the following scholars: Paul Ekman, Charles Goodwin, Gail Jefferson, Adam Kendon, David McNeill, Harvey Sacks, and Emanuel Schegloff.

Author: Bob Moore, Nic Ducheneaut & Eric Nickell. “10 Things About Conversation in Virtual Worlds that Remind Me that I’m NOT in the Real World: Improving Interactional Realism in Massively Multiplayer Persistent Worlds.” Austin Game Conference, Austin, TX, October 28, 2005.