He touches in his piece about something that I find very interesting and worth further exploration:
"the big question is when, why and how adults will want online
identities and what they'll want to do with them. seems like that
remains an open space. blogs serve this purpose in a crude way, but
probably way too much work. will a social network host emerge as the
myspace for the rest of us? what will be the killer apps, if they're
less dating focused?"
Where does online presence and online security begin and end?My personal view is that the battle for keeping information private was lost a few years back. There are no secrets in the on line world... A lot of people may disagree with me, but I think that the battle to maintain security over personal data is as likely to be won as the record companies are as likely to stop people from file sharing.
Where this is going in my opinion is to us all needing to generate personal aka's which will become on line avatars. We will create new personas online that will be the sponsors of the intelligent agents and bots that we send out to do our research. Soon we will all want to and maybe need to have new and alternate identities - particularly if we have a point of view about something that is radically different to our friends, neighbours or employers....
I see this including us having custom made voices that we will use on phone calls - shouldn't be too difficult to create an algorithm that is included into skype or your 3G phone that will mask your real voice and give you a new identity. And since the most likely people to want to have new identities are people who are either criminals or in government secret agencies (and maybe some of those are the same anyway!) it's possible this is happening already....
