Lost in the swirl of huge companies and their misleading public announcements are their descriptions of exactly what type of identity information is being shared and how. While Facebook, MySpace, and Google all publish technical documentation for developers of some sort, the non-developer has a very hard time grokking it. It’s very hard to see the bigger picture from the technical developer docs.

So kudos to Google for publishing an in-depth post on how Friend Connect works. They go into good depth about what information is shared and when it is shared. For example, they point out that the only bit of profile information that is passed by Google to third-parties using the service is the user’s profile picture…all other data is data that you input into Friend Connect as part of your Google profile.

Now, whether or not you agree with Facebook or Google in the current identity battle (part of a much larger war), you have to admit that this type of transparency is good for end users. We can learn about how these services work in layman’s terms, and can begin to understand what we need to do (if anything) to keep an appropriate level of control over our identity data.

Posts like this one by Google are exactly what we need from those companies who propose identity management technologies.

I remember when I first started using feed readers. I was excited. So excited, in fact, that I wrote an enthusiastic post about it. Here was a tool that would allow me to know whether sites had been updated without having to visit each one in turn. I wouldn’t have to suffer from the pain of manually checking web sites to see if something was new. From the single interface of my feed reader, I could keep track of all the domains that I was interested in, without missing anything. In theory, I would save a tremendous amount of time and be able to receive much more signal and a lot less noise.

The reality, however, was quite the opposite. Once I got a taste for feeds, I started subscribing to more and more of them. I subscribed to hundreds of them: news, design topics, friends, bloggers whose writing I enjoy. But before long I started being unable to follow all of them, as I would fire up my feed reader and have literally thousands of new posts to look through. I was suffering again.

Instead of solving my information problems like I had imagined, feeds had simply substituted one problem for another. Whereas before feed readers I was having a hard time finding all the newly updated content, after feed readers I was having a hard time reading it all.

Lifestreams

We see the same thing happening again with a new type of interface element called lifestreams. Lifestreams (also called activity streams) display the aggregated feeds of individuals in reverse chronological order. The Facebook news feed is probably the most well-known example of a lifestream. It aggregates all the activity of your friends on the service and displays it in a neverending stream of content. Ridiculed at first for being a privacy concern, the news feed is now a primary driver of activity on the site. People I’ve talked to seem to be very polarized about the feature. Some love it and use it constantly. Others ignore it, especially since the introduction of applications. And, just recently Facebook added the ability to import activity from other services such as Flickr, Digg, and Del.icio.us, adding even more content to the flow.

So, again, we have the firehose problem. While at first it seemed like a great idea to be able to follow our friends on all the services they participate in, the reality is that seeing it all in one place is overwhelming. Information flows in at such a high rate that you can’t come close to seeing it all, let alone making sense of it. If someone asks you if you saw their most recent macro shots of flowers uploaded on Flickr, for example, you have to think back to the hundreds of Flickr pictures you’ve seen floating in your stream recently and try to remember which ones were theirs. This might be manageable if you only follow a couple people, but it quickly scales out of control.

Instead of solving my information problems like I had imagined, lifestreams have yet again substituted one problem for another. Whereas before lifestreams I was having a hard time following my friends, after lifestreams I find out that most of what they do isn’t that interesting after all.

The Curse of Granularity

One way to combat this problem would be to create tools that allow people to granularly define what content they want to see. So, for example, you might be able to say “I want to see Josh’s pictures on Flickr but not his activity on Digg” or “Show me only Josh’s Del.icio.us feed”. This sounds like a great thing to be able to do, but it comes at a big expense: the time and effort of managing all of those decisions. Do you really want to manage settings for each one of the people you follow? I’ve started to do this on those services that allow me to, but one thought keeps niggling in my mind: what if I’m turning off good content? What if, for example, I miss a great photo in Flickr because I’ve granularly shut them out of my lifestream?

The larger problem is that we don’t know what content is valuable before we see it. While we would think that most of our friend’s content would be worth seeing, it’s definitely not the case. Once we are able to track the activities of the people we know and love we can’t help but come to the conclusion that they’re as mundane as we are. Perhaps this is another example of the 80/20 rule: 80% of the valuable information we receive from our friends comes from 20% of their activity.

What’s Next?

So how can we best manage the information firehose? We could hope for more granular controls, which have the overhead of managing them. Or, perhaps we need to periodically declare feed bankruptcy, where we simply turn it all off for a while to regain our sanity? Perhaps I’m not being optimistic enough: is there a way to help solve this problem with software that we just haven’t seen yet? Or, perhaps it exists and just isn’t evenly distributed?