Nice interview on Techcrunch about Vox, the new social network/blog platform from SixApart. I have to confess that I didn’t really see the point of Vox when it first appeared, given the existence of all the other social networks out there. SixApart’s Andrew Anker explains:
More importantly to Vox, we believe there is very little out there that is adequate serving the older, non “hooking-up†market. MySpace is great, but it’s not the best place to share pictures of your children with the friends and family you are closest to.
Vox will focus on finely-tuned privacy controls, allowing users to present a different face to different groups of people. Apparently, the rather crippling limitation of having to be a Vox user to leave comments will be removed too: “this will also be a user settable thing”.
I like all this. One issue with social networks is the extent to which your profile becomes your identity on the web. And the identity you present to friends or family might be very different to the one you want to present to your boss.
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The neat thing about social media is that it allows one to create virtual identities. Like you pointed out, it’s not like we, as a species, haven’t been doing it for centuries, i.e., family, friends and bosses. What is different with social media is that these identities become virtualized because the only connection we have with “others” (i.e., with other virtual identities) are the ideas and thoughts we convey. So the identities are virtualized and so are the “relationships.”
I think what we’ve come to discover is that it’s very difficult for software to mimic the complexity of our social relationships. In an age where everyone is on Google, managing our privacy and our online identities is going to be more of an anxiety and more time-consuming than we ever imagined.