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mangosteenContext: What follows is a thought that I need to develop more, but the nucleus was worth posting.
1. Facebook as a company constantly talks about making connections between people; but it can't, and it doesn't. Rather, Facebook makes connections between identities, because that's the most immediate thing it has access to: relationships (e.g. who you friend, who friends you, who you block/mute/etc.), and affinities in the forms of likes, shares, and postings.
2a. Facebook's problem is an interesting one: Identities don't click on ads and buy products. People do. To wit, someone who creates a Facebook account as a way to express one particular aspect of their personality will give a very skewed view of their ad preferences, and likely won't see relevant ads. Conversely, the more aspects of a person's personality are expressed in their postings on Facebook, the more relevant the ads are going to be.
2b. Since advertising is a numbers game, you as an individual aren't interesting, but "everyone like you" very much is. Ergo, a collection of interlinked people is a very potent engine to create the most valuable thing for advertisers... the largest pool possible of likely customers.
3. Facebook's goal is therefore to make people and identities as much of a one-to-one mapping as possible. One global person = one global identity = a stable target for ads.
4. Okay, so how do you do you make "identity" and "personhood" converge, given that humans don't really do "being the same person to everyone" very well? Well, we can look at what Facebook has already done to see how they are solving it: Facebook Login, Facebook Pixels on websites, The "Real Name" policy, making it more difficult than necessary to limit information, etc... but that all feels like begging the question a bit.
5a. To do this from first principles, the better question to ask first is "How are people and identities different?".
5b. The next question is "Who is identity convergence useful enough to, to pay real money for the service?", because that shapes the resources available.*
That's where I am right now.
* This is also the reason that Facebook is free for users. A user couldn't/wouldn't pay enough to make up for their potential lost revenue, presuming that making people pay will shrink the pool of users. See: advertising is a numbers game.
1. Facebook as a company constantly talks about making connections between people; but it can't, and it doesn't. Rather, Facebook makes connections between identities, because that's the most immediate thing it has access to: relationships (e.g. who you friend, who friends you, who you block/mute/etc.), and affinities in the forms of likes, shares, and postings.
2a. Facebook's problem is an interesting one: Identities don't click on ads and buy products. People do. To wit, someone who creates a Facebook account as a way to express one particular aspect of their personality will give a very skewed view of their ad preferences, and likely won't see relevant ads. Conversely, the more aspects of a person's personality are expressed in their postings on Facebook, the more relevant the ads are going to be.
2b. Since advertising is a numbers game, you as an individual aren't interesting, but "everyone like you" very much is. Ergo, a collection of interlinked people is a very potent engine to create the most valuable thing for advertisers... the largest pool possible of likely customers.
3. Facebook's goal is therefore to make people and identities as much of a one-to-one mapping as possible. One global person = one global identity = a stable target for ads.
4. Okay, so how do you do you make "identity" and "personhood" converge, given that humans don't really do "being the same person to everyone" very well? Well, we can look at what Facebook has already done to see how they are solving it: Facebook Login, Facebook Pixels on websites, The "Real Name" policy, making it more difficult than necessary to limit information, etc... but that all feels like begging the question a bit.
5a. To do this from first principles, the better question to ask first is "How are people and identities different?".
5b. The next question is "Who is identity convergence useful enough to, to pay real money for the service?", because that shapes the resources available.*
That's where I am right now.
* This is also the reason that Facebook is free for users. A user couldn't/wouldn't pay enough to make up for their potential lost revenue, presuming that making people pay will shrink the pool of users. See: advertising is a numbers game.
