Digital identities

I wondered the other day how users of social networking sites felt about the potential for their networks of friends and the information they've put up on their sites to be locked in, preventing them from migrating to the next hot social network. It so happens that today I saw two articles giving very different opinions on this very topic.

A ZDNet interview with various software developers working in the social networking area revealed that they think open access to locked-in data is very important. By contrast, Danah Boyd reckons that the generation of teenaged users who have driven the growth of the major social networks simply don't care about preserving their digital identity over time, being quite happy to open up another account at the drop of a hat.

If Danah Boyd is right and teenagers are in the habit of dropping online identities without a backward glance, the next question is what will happen as that generation of users get older. Will they find that they come to value the portability of their data as they have less free time to spend time building up new profiles and networks, or will their carefree attitude persist and we'll see throwaway online identities as the norm a decade from now? Or, to put it another way: how many MySpace users will one day celebrate their sixth blog-birthday?

(Me, I hate the idea that if I were to move to a different address I might lose my weblog entries. Come to that, it bugs me that the entries from the first couple of years or so of my weblog entries, which I hand-coded before I started using Movable Type and WordPress to run this site, can't easily be imported into this site so that they can be searched alongside the more recent entries. One day I'll write a macro to strip out the content from those old pages and convert it into a format that I can import into my WordPress setup. But then, I've been telling myself that for about three years now, so don't hold your breath…)

[ZDNet article via Slashdot, Danah Boyd post via Fimoculous.com]