Do You Ever See Me On The Web?

I imagine one day anyone could find themselves asking it to someone. The question: Do you ever see me on the web? I don’t mean at MySpace or Twitter. Running into me on AIM or Yahoo doesn’t count, either. They’re directly social and their purpose is to put people in contact with each other.

What I mean to ask is, do you ever stumble upon me at other places? “He who walks in wet sand leaves prints.” I tend to visit a whole lot of sites that are up and coming just to take a quick look around while the site is taking off. I create an account if necessary and often times never return to the site again (Orkut/Jaiku). Sometimes I abandon the site and return months later to discover that I rather like it (Twitter/Pownce).

That means I tend to visit a lot of different sites and I tend to leave a lot of comments. Once in a while I stumble upon one of my own comments that I have forgotten about and discover that it has become a top search results or top score (such as my Robomower review at Amazon.Com).

The longer I am online the more of these footprints in the wet sand I know I will make. That is also true for people I know who frequent many sites. I fully believe people will start seeing people they know in unexpected places on the web. Online social identities will start to become mainstream and it won’t be uncommon for the average person to have an online identity with a social network of it’s own and separate from that of its real world counterpart.

Then of course we have this whole OpenID thing going on. Yahoo jumping on that bandwidth because apparently having only ONE really big repository of all of your personal shit [Passport/Live ID] isn’t enough. I wonder if the internet is really ready for this. This very system which is supposed to simplify things seems to also complicate some things, not to mention issues with trust and security. I’m still not convinced it’s safe. I don’t think it’s unsafe in the eating uncooked meat that has been floating down a river for days kind of way but unsafe in the logging into a child porn site with your social security number kind. All of that aside though, one thing it will do is solidify our online identity.

I find myself wondering though, will accidentally finding online the people we know in real life become common place?

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 5:22 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.