Facebook’s Open Graph and the Curation of Your Image

I thought hard about what I could add to the conversation following Facebook’s open graph announcement at F8. There are obviously many thoughts I would like to share, but many don’t add anything to the conversation. There was one thing that really stuck home with me which I wanted to share my thoughts about.

Up until now, social networks have been about choosing what to share with the world. The default status of any social network was, empty. If you didn’t actively share anything, you weren’t sharing anything. The question of who you were sharing with has evolved over time as different platforms have taken difference stances on who can see the information you share, but throughout those changes, what specific pieces of information you choose to share were always up to you.

For example, the share function on Pandora Radio is excellent. I love being able to press one button and share a great song with my different social networks. I love sharing great music I find, or songs that represent something I’m feeling at the moment. To share that experience so easily with my social networks is amazing.

Sharing a specific link to a news article or blog post I’m reading is the same. I want people to read what I’m reading to understand what influences my thinking. It provides depth to me as a person. I truly believe that if you consumed the entirety of my social streams for a month you would know me better than most of the people I know in real life who don’t.

But in the end, it is my choice which pieces of information, out of everything I consume or do, that I share. This important distinction is about to change.

It started with Google Latitude, an application which allowed anyone to see where you were at any time via a signal from your smart phone. It was a little creepy, and I don’t know too many people besides me who use it. But the idea was out there, you set it once and your location from then on, if you are next to your phone, is open and social.

Facebook is about to take the next step in the uber open social web. At F8, they announced a complete paradigm shift in social, the idea that when you connect to an external application using your Facebook account, you are given the ability to press one button, and have everything you do on that application shared on Facebook.

Take a moment to let that sink in, one button, everything, for the rest of the time you use that application, without having to press share buttons.

I would expect more than half of you just had a very negative visceral reaction.

The idea is this, if I’m listening songs on Grooveshark, Facebook has access to each track I listen to, as well as what artists and genres I listen to most. Facebook will then show all of that information off in a packaged way on my Facebook profile and social updates. Instead of filling out my profile manually by telling people what I listen to by listing artists, Facebook is going to do it for me by aggregating the collective data from the music applications I’ve connected to.

If I connect to the New York Times with my Facebook account, Facebook has access to every article I read and what type of content I read most. Facebook can then display on my profile what type of reader I am, do I like the sports section or politics, and which writers do I read most frequently.

If I’m a Netflix user and I connect my Facebook account, Facebook will know which type of movies I watch most, what I’ve thumbs upped and what I’ve thumbs downed. They will be able to tell my Facebook profile everything about my movie watching habits, even what time of the day I watch movies most.

We are entering the era of big data, and Facebook has just positioned themselves to sit at the center of yours. They have just declared their candidacy for ownership of YOU, of who you really are, not what you choose to portrait to the world.

And this, this is what I want to talk about right now, this idea that Facebook wants to move social away from choosing what to share, and towards showing the world who you really are through the open graph. It opens up a whole discussion around whether people are really comfortable showing others who they actually are, even their closest friends, versus what they choose to portrait.

In many ways I love Twitter for this specific reason. If you choose to engage in sharing on Twitter, it is extremely hard to hide who you are, deep down. If you are a hate filled bigot, you’re going to come off as a hate filled bigot on Twitter due to the impulsive nature of the platform. If you are a pervert who likes to message college age girls as a congressional representative from New York, you’re going to show your package to the world. And if you’re a smart articulate thinker, you’re going to come off as such. Twitter is the truest social representation of yourself in a platform that asks you to share piece by piece.

But what Facebook is about to do goes much much deeper. They are about to aggregate your life, in its entirety, and put it on display, from the things you specifically share, to the media you consume regularly throughout the day. They will be shining a light on who you really are, not what you wish to portrait to the world.

While I am personally extremely open in terms of sharing on the web, I have honestly taken time to craft the specific image that I would like people to see. Openness and curation are not in opposition to one another. If you weren’t aware, I am 25 years old, but as someone who works in the financial field where many assume that a 25 year old couldn’t have the level of experience that I do, I don’t advertise my age. I would rather people see my ideas and knowledge versus my age and pedigree (my father is a lawyer and none of my other relatives work anywhere close to finance).

On Twitter, I delete at least two thirds of the messages I write before I post them. Why? Because I know that although I would love to share these thoughts, it isn’t appropriate. I don’t want everyone knowing everything I think, would you?

None of us is perfect, and god knows I have skeletos in my closet just as every one of you does. We all have things that we would rather people not know about us, things we would rather not share about ourselves with the world. These things are not necessarily bad, they are just things we would rather people not directly associate with us. The curation of an image is something everyone on this earth does.

Facebook is opening up this conversation, asking you, are you ok with sharing who you really are, in its entirety by connecting to these applications?

There are aspects of the open graph I love, like the ability to better understand myself. But there are many more aspects that scare even me, someone who has grown up in this age of social, someone who shares just about everything.

But do I really want everyone to know that I love the song City from Natalie Imbruglia?

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