Innovation in Software

The most interesting observation from the last few months of Facebook usage for me, is how people manage their online identities: they don’t.

You can have multiple profiles and link them together in Facebook if you want. To my knowledge, nobody I know does this – everything they do just piles into one profile. In fact, I’m not even sure people know you can do this. Being completely open with one profile would traditionally be considered a high-risk strategy when mixing business contacts and personal contacts.

We’ve all heard stories about the graduate applying for a job at a top firm and being the perfect picture of potential leadership until somebody finds their MySpace page, complete with pictures of drug use, snippets from their starring role in a ‘Girls Gone Wild’ video and profanity-filled exchanges with friends. We are told that “They” don’t like this – “we” should be wary.

I think paranoia is more to blame for these warnings than reality.

We are no longer living in a parody of the 1950s. I don’t think that society was ever really as rigid as the films and documentaries make it look – where everybody calls each other by their surname and a tipple too many after dinner left you a social outcast, but even if it was real we’re leaving that mode of thinking about each other and quickly moving into an era where authenticity matters.

As a potential employer, I would rather know a new manager has an “interesting past”. It would help me understand his/her character more than pretending they were conceived a perfect model of professionalism.

I don’t know if the rest of the World is going to see things the way I do, but I know that Facebook and social network apps like it are making more people face up to the reality of dealing with people as they are, not how we’d like them to be.