A thought that has been on my mind these past few days and that I thought I’d finally try to put down in writing, maybe in an attempt to sort out my ideas, and save them for future reference.
The thing is that on most of these web services where you have to setup your profile; whether it be a social networking site, a job site, or any other kind of service; and even offline; whether it be a CV, a business card or presentation; you always end up with a one dimensional profile of yourself, just one way of presenting yourself from just one point of view.
But is that enough?
Are we as humans really that simple, straightforward or even that dull?
I don’t really think so.
We exist in different contexts and move around in different circles in our everyday lives, and it’s impossible to believe that one profile totally covers us and describes us best everywhere, every time, with everyone.
Personally, at my current job, in professional meetings, IT discussions, and generally in that IT related context, I’m the product development manager who has years of experience in the field.
When I’m with a certain group of my friends, I’m a passionate photographer, who’s always trying out new techniques, playing around with new perspectives and building up a portfolio of interesting shots.
With others in different contexts like meetups, some conferences, some interviews; I’m known as a blogger, Subzero Blue, one of the first Tunisian bloggers, who has been blogging for years now and in some way or another helped spread blogging in Tunisia.
These are all different points of view that show a different side to the same person; and there are still more now; there were others before and there’ll be others to come.
So are the simple profile systems we have in place today truly representative of who we are as human beings?
Of course, if you’re already in a specialized context, then that’s no problem, you’re going to choose the profile that fits the most; but when it comes to more general services, it’s just not enough.
Simply put, the same person can answer the same question “Who are you?” with a range of different answers depending on the situation, the context, the where, and the when.
Profiling systems just have to take all those different answers into consideration.
nobody designs a multi profile user management system, because for long time now, user management systems were side facilities of the main functionalities of the system.
and they’re probably right for these reasons :
– when you design an app you have to focus on the main functionalities
– most users are new to internet (and computers in general) so they both don’t need and are uncomfortable with advanced functionalities like multi profiles
but things change. there is a new class of apps where the main functionality is – you guessed it – user management, or I’d better say profile management, authentication, identification. I’m talking about openid.
try http://myopenid.com. when you identify for the first time on site XXX using your openid, you are asked to chose a profile for this specific site. so you can have a different name, email, etc… from the ones you provide for site YYY, whereas you identify with the same openid.
nobody designs a multi profile user management system, because for long time now, user management systems were side facilities of the main functionalities of the system.
and they’re probably right for these reasons :
– when you design an app you have to focus on the main functionalities
– most users are new to internet (and computers in general) so they both don’t need and are uncomfortable with advanced functionalities like multi profiles
but things change. there is a new class of apps where the main functionality is – you guessed it – user management, or I’d better say profile management, authentication, identification. I’m talking about openid.
try http://myopenid.com. when you identify for the first time on site XXX using your openid, you are asked to chose a profile for this specific site. so you can have a different name, email, etc… from the ones you provide for site YYY, whereas you identify with the same openid.
btw, you have a usability problem on your blog. when i post a comment it vanishes without a notice.
this is to justify the double posting of my last comment 😉
p.s. you can delete this comment
M., what you’re talking about reminded me of the identity (and also multiculturalism)-debate in the social sciences. Of course your identity changes according to the seeting where you are: in one context you’re mainly a father, in another it’s more important that you’re muslim or arab, in another its that you love blogging etc. etc.
For a quick intro into this topic see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_%28social_science%29#Identity_in_social_anthropology
Let’s forget all these sites and services for a while and ask yourself the same question : “Who am I?”. There are chances for your answer to vary depending on the when/where/how environment…
In fact, the answer will probably vary accordingly to how you want to be represented in a particular situation and how you “define” yourself in that context.
In non specialized context, you are generally invited to describe all your faces (job definition, activities, hobbies, interests…) and there are chances that the profiling system uses all these informations to “know” you and communicate with you.
The problem occurs with humans. When you connect to such a platform, you’ll not spend a bench of time discovering all the faces of a person, and most of the time you’ll be drawing a picture just reading the nickname or the short description of that person.
I think tagging can be very helpful in these situations as a rapid way to “know” people, may be can profiling systems do something to make them more significant…