I'm sure many of you have seen the Social Number social network about by now.
If you haven't, it's a network based around anonymity - in this case,
the anonymity is about creating an online identity distinct from your
meatspace identity. At Social Number, everyone is just a number. A ten
digit number, enough for 10 billion people.
With this numbering
system, you can still tag all articles back to the same 'user', it's
just that this number has a certain abstraction to it. If you like
several articles from user 6660000666 then there's a reasonable chance
you might like the next article by them. And you may wish to
communicate with that specific user.
It's not a bad system, and yet in practice people have trouble identifying numbers. They're like sheep to the non-shepherd.
So
what about a way to add a recognition layer on top, whilst keeping the
unidentifying numbers underneath, and not adding any linkage between
meatspace you and online you?
Consider.
At the client
side, map names to the numbers. The easiest way is to supply a list,
have the selection fully automated, though there's no reason why you
couldn't have manual overrides where desired. Supply a text file and
the numbers making posts could be Mary Jane instead of 1011325366 or
Captain Picard instead of 4569871235. Text files could either suit your
culture / demographic, or be something more whimsical. Have the
network filled with a mix of popular first and last names for your
country, or use only the limited set of names that your country dictates
are allowed. Or go for biblical names. Or Star Wars names. Or
Tolkien characters. Victorian era names, or medieval names, or 20th
century political leaders or traditional Chinese names.
Since the
underlying identifier remains, there's no reason why you couldn't
converse within the system and refer to a poster using your own identifier, and have it auto-translated for other clients. Your own
comment of "I admired that last post by Luke Skywalker" gets rendered as
"I admired that last post by Peter McDonald" on someone else's machine,
and "I admired that last post by Mao Zedong" on yet another user's
machine.
User 1011325366 has no idea you know him/her as Luke Skywalker, or that someone else knows them by the moniker Peter McDonald.
At
first blush, it seems like all you've done is take Social Number's one
differentiating feature - apparent anonymity - and remove it, replacing
it with monikers akin to other social networks.
But this is not
true, since for a start, the number still remains as the identifier.
But more importantly, you have shifted the naming from the server (of
posts) to the client (the consumer of posts). In the Facebook world, I
name myself and others recognise me by the title that I display. In
this Layered Social Number world I am powerless to name myself, and am
known by no common name - and yet remain as identifiable within the
system to the same extent as the original underlying number.
The
system doesn't even need support beyond the individual client. Mapping
numbers to names and displaying those instead can all be done on the
local machine. With or without other clients running the same layering
software, it doesn't matter, as clients can only export the numbers of
other users, since the names are useless outside of the local machine.
In
effect, it is much like speaking to a person in another language on the
phone and having auto-translation occur in between. You have no idea
if the other person is speaking Japanese, or French, or English. All
you know is that you speak in one language and it appears as if the
other user understands and speaks the same language.
The content
retains the focus and the anonymity of the author has not been
compromised or self-polluted, but the ability for other humans to
attribute multiple posts to the same author has been eased.
See:
http://socialnumber.com/
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