The decentralised online self

I’ve rolled out a quick design update to present the first of a series of shorter posts — with the express aim of encouraging more frequent blogging.

Earlier this month Tony Haile talked about the mobile number’s role as the ‘centre’ of our social network identity:

Much of the role of the cell phone number as the centre of our digital identity has been usurped by our social network profiles. Our unique identifier is now our URL, messages that once might have been SMS texts now find themselves on our Facebook walls or in status updates and the profile has become the main conduit of communications with our friends. Our digital identities have become much richer with the web of content and relationships our profiles display and yet the same problems remain. Our profiles lock us in to a specific provider and to change means jettisoning everything and beginning again with nothing.

I have less of a problem with disparate identities/profiles/personas than others do — I’m happy to spread bits of me around, so long as I have control over the way the data is shared from each of these services. My location is on Dopplr and Fire Eagle; my photos on Flickr, and so on. Perhaps these aren’t great examples, in fact, as they’re bastions of data portability, and thus will confuse one issue with another, but my principle stands firm. I’m not so bothered about this multifaceted self. In fact, Jeffrey Zeldman points to Jody Ferry’s site as an example of total ‘decentralisation’, as he puts it.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Not every person who designs websites needs to run a personal magazine on top of all their other responsibilities. If your goal in creating a personal site way back when was to establish an online presence, meet other people who create websites, have fun chatting with virtual friends, and maybe get a better job, well, you don’t need a deep personal site to achieve those goals any more. But if world domination is your goal, think twice before offloading every scrap of you.

Haile discusses data portability with ID portability in the same breath — and while I care moderately about one, I think that so long as data is reasonably movable, we don’t need to worry too much about the other.