I've been saying this for a long time, so it's nice to see mainstream media catch on: social networks end anonymity on the web. At least, they have the potential to. A recent article in Time Magazine may be only the beginning.
Your average person on the internet is and largely has been the opposite of anonymous. Logging in from home, or the same work computer, they probably are always on the same IP address. Google stores their searches indefinitely, and if one were to cross reference anything - say, directions on Google Maps against their Google Calendar (or evite RSVPs) figuring out who, exactly, any given "anonymous" IP address actually is wouldn't be that difficult. I'm not familiar enough with how everyone out there handles URLs, but it's not difficult to imagine the referring page's URL from an email or other secure program having something that would identify the user, or at least the account, for the next page they see. But I'm getting technical - and that's the point. Your average internet user isn't aware of any of this, they just think by clicking "Clear Private Data" or "Delete History" they've covered their tracks.
Online advertising, and behavioral targeting in particular, tries to un-anonymize. If people who go to a certain website - say, for gamers - have a propensity to click on a certain type of ad - say, for Porsche - they'll target better. If you have visited a behavioral targeting ad company's network site and picked up a cookie (without knowing it) they're seeing everywhere you go (where they have a relationship) and tuning advertising to - if not to you, to people like you. You don't notice, because it doesn't hurt a bit. It does pay really well, though.
The fact is that only really hackers and other savvy anarchy-prone people ever truly take full advantage of the anonymity of the web. The recent WikiTracker news goes to show that we're not nearly as anonymous as we think; then again when was the last time you heard about an accidental leak of a money laundering operation's IP addresses?
The money launderers aren't on facebook, and aren't likely to be. That 0.01% of the market will remain unpenetrated. But for the rest of us, it's nice to have an actual identity.
Everywhere I go on the net I am honest about - my username is usually "alex" (if I find out about something before anyone else named Alex) or "alexs" or "shartsis". My IM names are all basically some combination of those words or initials. Because I'm a real person, I have a reputation in real life, and there's no reason not to live up to that reputation in online life. Isn't it obvious?
Not so much, apparently, to the CEO of Whole Foods. By having an "anonymous" username on a finance chat site, he thought it was okay to talk about the company's prospects and to lambaste the competition. To me this is not only immaturity at work, it's ignorance and foolishness. If you're rich, famous, or both the internet will be less anonymous for you than for anyone else. Why? Because the data is all out there. All it takes is a little motivated searching. Celebrity and money are two good motivations. Do robbers stake out the average looking house, or the posh looking house? (And remember, Yahoo!, Google, eBay and the rest of the web has people behind it - employees with access to all that data.)
Facebook is great because, like other social networks, it encourages people to behave themselves as they would offline, in the "real" world. You wouldn't flame someone, or insult them, for no reason, in public. You wouldn't yell and scream about most things - especially not minor things. But people do that online. Not when it's easy to see who the real person is, and bring the what should be uncomfortable online yelling match into a decidedly awkward offline yelling match.
Over the course of the next few years, I think the social nets have the potential to return the world to pre-industrial age social responsibility. In a town before the industrial revolution, people had reputations. Some worked to escape them - or left - because the system was far from perfect. But unless you wanted the reputation for being the village crazy person, you didn't yell at people for no reason, or do mean things to them. You apologized. You acted financially responsible when you were around the banker. The banker always wore a suit, because he carried on his shoulders the responsibility for everyone's financial security and to do otherwise might have been cause for concern. The industrial revolution and the rise of cities changed that. The seedy parts of cities visited by characters in Oscar Wilde books and plays were not where respectable people went or were seen precisely because of the anonymity they afforded. (Dorian Gray would love the internet). Because of this anonymity and double life, society maintained illusions and facades - to its detriment.
The social nets could change that. They could blend the cosmopolitan and accepting nature of city life with the accountability of social groups. The outing of a few clown marketers on Wikipedia is only the beginning. So is the ham-handed behavioral targeting that's available today. Just wait for Facebook.
