Today I decided to try out wordpress – I have been reading blogs for a while and found that I express some of my ideas and thoughts in all those disparate web 2.0 / social networking style entities: yelp, flickr, linkedin, studivz (german equivalent of facebook/myspace), …
So here are my two main concerns
1. ‘personality striptease’ ?
These websites tend to make you publish too much personal information. In particular facebook/studivz are ‘greedy’ for any bit of personal info since they aim to monetize it by targeted advertisement.
One way to address this is to have multiple identities, a professional one, a private-public one, a private-friends one, and ideally they are under pseudonyms with minimal overlap in published content to make it hard to identify them… Of course this makes the second point even worse:
2. manageability
I have to keep all those accounts and passwords straight – wouldn’t it be nice if we had a strong central authentification mechanism?
Since flickr is part of yahoo I liked the fact that I did not have to keep a separate identity for my email and my photos since they now are under the umbrella of the same provider – thats great. But cross-provider would be even better, albeit more dangerous…
facebook and the like try to offer this, to consolidate different social networking providers into one view – while I think that is great for the owner of the view, it is undesireable to publish the joined view to the public or greedy data collectors.
So here I come, creating yet another username account, and linking together at least three presences: wordpress, flickr, yahoo email. Lets see how it goes… – WordPress has something called OpenId that seems to do what I want, but none of the sites I currently use are listed on their https://www.myopenid.com/directory
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