 Hi, I'm Mike, owner and operator of MarketPiper.com, a web analytics company, and I'm just here to learn more about connectivity, pretty much. I'm Dane, my favorite life hack is smooth DIY projects, and I'm a computer science student. My name is Laurel, I work at O'Reilly Media, we're interested in all sorts of technology, especially internet of things, drones, people, and what I'm seeing as a theme here is kindness and how we are kind to each other as we delve more into technology. I'm Heather, I am a citizen of the internet, I don't know, I mean like the work I do, not super pertinent to this conference. I went to ITP at NYU, the Interactive Telecommunications Program, if you want to guess what that actually means, and yeah, I'm just here to listen mostly. Hi, I'm Ivan, I'm a programmer and a computer artist, and I teach programming at NYU. I just have a general kind of interest in technology, I'm just here to hang out with Heather and you guys. Hi, I'm Ben, I'm the co-founder and CEO of an open source social web platform called Known, I believe really strongly that the next Facebook is the web. I'm Erin, I'm the other co-founder of Known, so it's an open source platform for running your own websites and connecting with other people online through social networks and through this decentralized network that we're building, and I'm interested in social interactions online and what people do with them. This is really strange having just, anyway, I'm Sarah Goss, I'm a student of museum studies, I'm an undergrad, I'm just mostly interested in using social media as an institution and kind of what that's like and what might be as Facebook and other kinds of social media are evolving. Hi, I'm Yanis, I'm a researcher at the Harvard Design School and my work focuses on urban infrastructure systems and how to use information technology to improve their sustainability. I'm CJ Carr, I make things. I'm Laura Newhouse, I'm interested in our dress codes. Hi, I'm Leo Canty, I don't do any work, I'm done with that, so I pursue things on an intellectual level and right now I'm seeking the answer to what will humans do when robots do all the work. I'm Irv and I'm a professor of computer science, a topic that really fascinates me is the unintended consequences of technology, both positive and negative. Ciao, my name is Leah and I'm visiting here at Comparative Media Studies, I'm a sociologist and I'm really interested in that. Yeah, so I'm Patrick and like I said, I studied Harvard and I'm also very passionate about technology. So maybe before we start you want to do some introductory remarks? So we all know, we're all connected all the time, we are always online and one of the most dynamic developments of the past decade on the online has been the rise of social network sites, we all know that and the past decade has been really characterized by persistence of content, by shareability of content, right, searchability, but now that seems to be changing with the rise of the ephemeral apps that are kind of transforming the way we perceive others online, how we are presenting ourselves to others through the internet and we're moving towards, it seems like we're moving towards this approach where before we were using all these different social media applications as a form of exhibition, we were just saying something and then it would stay there and people could interact with it at a later point in time and now it seems like we're moving from the exhibition to the experience for itself with apps like Snapchat or other ephemeral apps. So we wanted to find out what do you think about what the future of the internet is going to look like, is it going to be fully ephemeral, will it be something that will still persist, is Facebook going to stay, is Facebook going to be replaced, what in your opinion is kind of the future of social online, how are we going to interact with each other say in 10 years? Do you have any ideas about that? Yes, so maybe more tangible, you can talk about things that like sort of problems in your life, like things that are really troubling you right now that you would like to see improved and then because otherwise it's a little bit off the cuff. So what are some things that currently you're doing and you see they could be done in a different way or they could be done better and then we can start from there. I think it doesn't have to be related to social because as Ben was talking about, he believes the next Facebook is web, right? So just as when Google was the next, like people ask what's the next Google, people didn't really look into social networking, right? So it doesn't have to be that sort of area. Most likely will not be social networking, which is the next Facebook, right? Ben, what do you think? So you said web was important. So I mean, I think you can think of the apps that we all use. So Facebook, Snapchat and so on, really still as proofs of concept were really at the beginning of development of these technologies. And I think the problem that we have right now is we're running, you know, we've gone down this road of taking what have been very small proofs of concept to kind of their logical conclusion, which is, you know, very big, you know, billions of users on these proofs of concept. But the because of the way they've been built, a very small number of companies actually own our interactions. And because of that, they actually own the form and content of our interactions as well. Their design decisions actually affect the way we all converse with each other. And so the big change that lots of people and Tantek has spearheaded a community that has really, you know, is helping to change that. The, you know, we're going to see technologies that actually empower us to talk to each other as naturally as, you know, we would face to face, you know, where we control the form of our communication. How do you think that would look like, like specifically, like, you know, I think it would, you know, we're talking about sort of cyborgs here. I think it's very personal. I think it isn't a one size fits all kind of mentality. It's actually lots of personal technologies that can talk to each other, you know, that have enough in common that they can actually interact with each other rather than a one size fits all, we're all using this social wall. We're all using these profiles kind of experience. Do you see any companies doing that right now? There are some projects that are doing it right now. We're trying, you know, we're trying to do this. There are other projects that are doing this. The indie web community is certainly looking at this kind of thing. There's other, there's certainly projects that are up and coming. There is beginning, we're beginning to see a swing back towards individuality, I think on the internet. So this is quite interesting. So you're mentioning individuality and kind of a conscious refusal of the existing Cuban platforms, right? And this is what Tantek has been doing as well, right? Saying, I have my own website, I put my content on my own website and only then link that to Twitter, so that people can interact with it. Could you maybe talk kind of more about the philosophy that you have? So I actually thought your first question about what's going to be in 10 years. What was the question again? Can you repeat the question about 10 years? So what is the social intent is going to look like in 10 years? OK. Is it going to be like people having like their own websites? Is it going to be really individual or what do you think about it? So how many of you had pagers or ever had a pager? Anybody? Some people? OK, a few of you. How many of you have pagers today? None of you. OK. So here's my prediction. I'll start with this. At the beginning of the year, I gave up a phone number. I don't have a phone number anymore. I just use this device. You can call it a phone. It kind of vaguely gives you that kind of functionality. In 10 years, I predict all of you will have your own site. You'll just call it a site. Like I have a site and it'll be tied to one or more of your devices that'll just work seamlessly pair with each other. Some of you will probably still have phones to sort of talk to the old world. And in 20 years, none of you will have phones just like today, none of you have pagers or fax machines. And all you will have is you'll have a site. You'll buy a device. You'll pay some provider for site service. And that's how you'll interact with everyone. You'll sign into things with your site. It'll just be a thing that everyone just has a site. Just like today, everyone has a cell. And it's one of those obvious profound changes that's going to happen and flip so fast that people will be like, well, of course that was going to happen. Why didn't we all see it coming? And some of us are actively working to make that happen as fast as possible. Can you talk a little bit about your own work and how you're trying to make that happen? OK. Just really briefly. In 2009, I got very frustrated with Twitter. So essentially, I built a clone for publishing short text notes on my own site. And from then, I decided starting with 2010, January 1st, I would no longer post content first on Twitter. So since then, every tweet that you see from at T got posted to tauntik.com, copied to Twitter. And then from there, Twitter copied it to Facebook. I also don't post natively on Facebook either. Last year, because my parents started calling me on FaceTime instead of on the phone, I decided, oh, well, let me see if I can just use my iPod and not my cell phone, which I'll leave in my backpack. And so then this year, I stopped using that. So phone number as identity is one of those things that will also go away, I predict. Because we're going to try all these things and make it much easier for people to do. So speaking of identity, are you seeing that a site identifier will be much easier to actually identify who people are versus a social security number or a telephone number like John Smith, right? He's kind of screwed if he has johnsmith.com. So he has to somehow have a very unique identifier. But then also we use identity to confirm so many things and purchases, important real-life scenarios. So what does this site kind of, is it a number? Is it always still going to be a number? Well, do you know your own phone number, right? Do you know all your credit card numbers? No. Do you know your IP address? No. The same thing will be true. I see what you're saying. Yeah, so one number for all the things. Well, it won't be a number. It'll just be your name or your site that you've chosen by whatever name. Like phone numbers are no better than IP addresses. It's kind of ridiculous. It's just as ridiculous to remember a phone number as it is to remember an IP address. It makes no sense. This actually brings us to a really interesting point about identity and what it means online, right? Because we are given a name. There is a wallet name as we call it, right? Something that's on your ID, something that's on your credit card. But online, if you come to create your own site, you can choose the name you want to be identified with, right? So what do you think about kind of the real name web? What do you think about the implications of choosing your own name and having the freedom of choosing an identity marker that will be there potentially forever online? Have you seen the movie Her? And there was also... Sorry for my English, I just came from Italy. There is also this lot of conference here in MIT about verbal technologies and about someone an inhuman actor that talked to you saying could be your coach, could be... So I think that it's, of course, an old question. The philosopher Bruno Latour talked about reassembling the social. To think the social as an interaction between human and non-human actors and also you can have this kind of identity that come out from the interaction with these non-human. Now we can see just a trace of these when you buy things to Amazon. After Amazon tell you who are you. Like, you can be interested in this and that and there is a kind of memory of you there that is also a construction, a dynamic construction of your identity. So if I think an interactive word in the future I think a kind of mixed talking about yourself also. Do you think that such an identity should be fluid or should it be fixed with a certain site? Should it be something that crosses different platforms or should it be... Do you want to have an identity on each and every single platform like Amazon and so on? I think that... I'm not deterministic. So there is in technological terms there is a cultural change first that meets a technology and I think that it will be really fluid. Really fluid. Maybe there is no at the moment technology that you can... For example, yesterday I don't know there was an interesting conference on news how we stay all the time in contact and in connection with news and if you do not front line stuff like that. And they are looking at the mobile. The mobile it will be the future but now there is no technology that supports this because of a technological problem but I think everything will be converged in one platform that is really... So if I understood your question you were wondering is it a good idea if we have one identity on all platforms and I guess I would wonder if it's a good idea that we have one identity at all. We do have different personas in different environments. I'm in my professional persona right now and later I'll be in a playful persona with my family. Should it be that all those personas should be merged into one or should they be separated? So I think there is a point to be made there about control and choice and going back to this morning privacy. I mean we all have... Really we do all have different identities. We all have different facets to who we are. Some of those identities are more public than others and really it's got to be... I mean the danger is if we have an identifier that is enforced on us and it is enforced that we have a single identifier. If we have the ability to create as many identifiers as we need that's an empowering platform. That allows us to communicate as we do in real life and there's a real difference there and I think that's something that the existing social platforms really struggle with and partially because they don't have a broad awareness because of that sort of composition of the different kinds of identities and the different kinds of struggles that people can actually have. I would add to that also we've done a lot of talking over the last few months with a whole variety of different people from all different wakes of life to find out what they think about their identity and their profiles online and how they use social media and how they use their websites and there are definitely people out there who have in their mind a sort of singular online identity and they maintain that across the various social profiles and different websites that they participate in and some people very much cater personas of themselves to different social networks and a lot of times it comes down to the audience and the community on those social networks and some people have said it's easier if they understand the audience or the community on that social network it's easier for them to understand who they're communicating with and then they tailor that persona that part of themselves and their communications to that audience or that community and if they join a new social network or a new group of people where they don't have a clear understanding of who those people are it's harder for them to interact because they're not really sure what part of me in my showcasing what kind of conversations are we having so you might hear people say they have a profile on LinkedIn and that's a very professional business side of themselves and they have a profile on Facebook and that's a very personal family side of themselves and they don't necessarily want those two merged together and really closely tied as a singular identity but other people don't care as much and don't mind as much having all those tied together and just sort of sharing the same information with all those groups of people and some people draw very strong lines and to the point of using completely different names different avatars, different images with different groups of people and different communities online Do you think we'll see more segmentation or less segmentation of identities online? I think the closest thing I could think of right now is it's sort of like email addresses we probably all have at least one email address and probably we've had more than one over time some of us probably have just one main email address right now that we use some of us might have a personal email address and a work email address and our work email address might have changed over time and some people have a single email address that they actually share with their family and that family just uses one email address and that is the singular address that that group of people used to communicate with other people and we have the ability right now if we wanted to set up multiple email addresses associated with different jobs or different projects or different aspects of our lives or different groups of people that we're communicating with and I think it depends on the individual and who they're trying to reach who they're communicating with and it is very easy right now for lots of people to establish those sort of channels of communication and I think in the future maybe email addresses aren't the primary method of communication but whatever is the primary method of communication people will probably treat that in a similar way so I just want to add a really short addition to that which is that I have four primary email addresses right now and it's a complete pain in the ass and so anything that allows and I definitely have more facets than that to my identity so whatever platform exists in the future has to be easier than managing my four email addresses on this phone which is just cognitively horrible I don't think we have the right user interfaces for that I absolutely agree, multi-homing is a huge pain in the ass excuse my French but we had that same phenomenon when Facebook launched people were on MySpace people were on Orchid, on Friendster and for a certain period of time they were maintaining a number of separate accounts and kind of growing different personas on these sites and then at some point all these things converged so is this where we're going? So every time there's a new app that is launched will there be this certain period of time where people have multiple accounts but in the end one of them will prevail or how do you see that? I hope not, I hope they don't go into one I mean in the same way it is a pain no question, I mean I have five emails that I'm working with right now but in the same way that we have different physical spaces that we go into and behave in different ways we can have different social spaces online that we go into and behave in different ways and to me that's an advantage, not a disadvantage even though it requires you to remember where you are now and who am I with now but that's part of being human right we associate in different ways in different places So I don't think different spaces and identity are sort of like mutually exclusive so I think if you look at the real world you have one identity and then you have different layers with the new identity and you just decide to share different layers to different people right and so I think in the future what you will see is basically the online world will replicate whatever is happening in the real world and so I think there will just be one sort of identity and then you decide who you want to share what kind of parts of the identity you want to share with other people but I think we don't want to go back to the pre-Facebook era where everybody is going to be anonymous and I think we're very segmented into this way where people have sort of a passport online and you know it's like their identity and it's really entrenched and Facebook is really driving this you know so yeah so maybe if we go back to the initial question which was what is the next Facebook I think a really interesting question is to ask yourself how did you look at the future from the past right so if you looked 10 years ago you know the big thing was search as I mentioned previously but you didn't really see Facebook coming right Google Eric Schmidt always regrets that that you know he hasn't invested enough into social networking so like what do you think are some sort of trends right now and Peter Thiel likes to talk about that when he says what are some sort of ideas that nobody agrees with you on like do you see some companies or do you see some trends that like you really see there's potential like Apple you know when Steve Jobs was still head of Apple sort of like where do you see like innovation coming from and where do you see sort of you know the sort of the next Facebook coming from I talked to one of the guys at the Mozilla Foundation and he said they were trying to design and a internet identity and at the user agent level right on that a little bit so what does that mean so your browser is the identity which if apps want to grab a content from you you as what is a basic idea I'm butchering it the idea is that we want to give the individual more control over their identity and what kind of information they give out so is that sort of like what Facebook is doing sort of giving people more transparency over their own data is that what you're talking about yeah I'm I don't look it up for a long time we've seen this development that companies like the Mozilla Foundation or even Google Chrome started to introduce this new layer of control that is between you the user and the operating system that would provide an identity layer that would enable to kind of browse the internet to save all your passwords to be kind of the real you that then exhibits different facets of the self to different sites online so is this what we were talking about that the browser is going to be kind of this identity layer that's going to be vital for the next social thing online yes okay I was going to say I think that's fair because you can use your social sign in as your identity because they want you to tie to some of the platforms they can give as much data about you as possible and so whenever I see these I always use my personal email because that's a we're kind of used to in this world having a fake account and a real account so if you tie like things you're just trying once or twice to your fake account you don't have a lot of vested there but when you're trying something new for the first time and tying it to your real identity startups forget that and because they need the analytics and want the analytics so they want to know who you are exactly right off the bat but those of us who've been around for a while don't want to give up our information so easily so I think that's one of the things that's unpopular is untie everything from social sign in I'm tired of it those buttons don't work for the user they only work for the person creating the startup and even when you have to decide on a platform like we're Apple users or Google users depending on your phone there's a small handful of Microsoft users as well but I decided a long time ago I am a Google user so I will use the Android phone because it ties into my email, ties into everything that I do and it's very hard to then separate yourself on different devices with these different methods trusting the customer over time absolutely the data that you can get from these kind of social sign in we have a couple of marketing experts here Mike did you want to talk about that maybe about kind of the data that is available from these social sign in and what it means for marketers and people who want to sell people products based on that data well first of all I want to agree with you I can't stand the social sign in for everything one that's a security issue but at the same time you can get a lot of information from that in your own backend analytics Google Analytics for example has revolutionized itself in the last few years they've added those variables gender this and that and that's because the advent of Chrome and the Chrome login it ties into everything Google and every time you go to something Google you have to decide if I want to use this login or this login you can see all these statistics in the backend of the website that helps people like myself to identify target markets to see who is using the website and actually gear the website up to cater to these age groups after you get so much data but I don't know I kind of see the whole social media platforms kind of starting to blend together I mean you've seen recently how Facebook uses hashtags now they don't work but 90% what I was going to say is 90% of the people have the wrong reasons and that's what I'm trying to there's a double-edged sword to all these different technologies I don't think that there's going to be a new and better Facebook I think that there's going to be all these features kind of blended together and they're going to be used on all the platforms so does that make sense Facebook's had hashtags for almost a year now longer it's kind of they don't work at all they don't actually produce results I don't really believe it just to follow up on the Mozilla Foundation comment about identity or browser level identity Mozilla did do something called persona trying to make a way for people to use their email address as their identity without having to give everyone a username password pair it had some success but not a lot of success but in general I'm going to say that apply the following filter if someone's talking about some new identity system or technology or thing that's going to happen or thing that they're proposing ask them if they're using it on their own website and if they're not tell them they're full of it until they are because they haven't figured out how to get it working I feel like I've been talking a lot but I think there's a couple of things to say the first is we were just confirming because Erin's a user experience expert and she just confirmed to me that native logins, i.e. the ones that don't use social logins actually have better conversions unless you're actually deeply tying into the network and there's a real reason for you to log in with Twitter or whatever you're logging in with and the reasons to get that data I think there's a lot of disinformation there was actually a post this week I guess by Dustin Curtis the creator of Subtle who was talking about how really you need to gather all this information about your users in order to build better products and do it surreptitiously, basically have all the tracking codes and really gather all this all this aggregate data it's not true it's really not true there are all kinds of explicit user research techniques that people use to build websites where you actually get people in you can do things when you have people who are who are consenting to be part of user research you can do things like eye tracking you can do things like movement tracking you can actually really ask them and really get a sense of what it is they're looking for and really get much, much more insightful feedback than you can out of a set of very aggregate statistical data and build a better product out of that the only real reason to gather that kind of information is to run targeted ads and I would argue the targeted ads and the existing crop of social networks kind of go hand in hand in a very insidious way they're actually in many ways the existing social networks exist to gather your information in order to show ads at you which in itself is inherently a violation of your privacy and your rights online the users are still there nobody is migrating to ELO unfortunately ELO does not solve any kind of problem there needs to be an actual crop of real alternatives and people need to look at different business models as part of that to actually create sustainable products that take revenue and actually empower people in different ways in a sustainable way that is founded in solid business practices this is actually a great concluding remark I guess we need to empower our users we need to work with our users together we can't just exploit the data they are giving and we need real user consent rather than just the consent that because everyone is there I have to join and I don't care about the terms and conditions but that's something that sounds great but who's going to do that it's like in theory this is a great idea but then really startups incentivize to do this maybe to go back to the initial question again anybody has any takes on any big ideas or anything like that because we talk within social networking which is the existing paradigm but do you have anything outside the paradigm something different I think something that Ben said making our communications closer to the value of a face to face interaction is something that's really important and I think is a paradigm shift away from the current social media current information sharing methods that we have on the internet now so I think in the future we should be looking in terms of how do we actually make that happen how do we convey things like emotions or like humor or in more meaningful ways that create meaningful connections among people I mean that's maybe sounds idealistic but I think that is where the future should lie in these sorts of things and quite possibly does lie so I would add one more sort of technology trend that is very much on the fringe I think right now and hasn't tipped but maybe in the next 10 years will be something that we might see more and that's around Duxeril's idea VRM vendor relationship management so that's not something that you really see any platforms advertisers doing right now because people are still trying to figure out how to make that happen but where today we sort of live in this world where advertisers are shoving things in your face online that they want you to buy and they track what you look at online and other things that you view and purchase and try and use their algorithms to make assumptions about what you might be interested in with VRM theoretically it would give you as an individual the opportunity to say I am looking for this sort of thing so I'm looking for a plane ticket from this airport to this airport on this day in this price range or I'm looking to buy this kind of laptop case for this kind of laptop or I'm looking to buy this kind of house in this price range in this neighborhood you put out things that you're looking for and people are able to grab that information and they compete to give you the best possible matching product or service so it's different than the model we have today and it's not something that platforms and providers have really figured out how to handle or implement or use right now so it's very much like a concept on the fringe but I think we're getting closer to the space where people understand the general concept more and we might in the next 10 years start to see that actually implemented more online I would like to say I'm a bit skeptical about having one yes sorry I'm a bit skeptical about having one single digital identity that consolidates all our digital activities and if we make this comparison with the physical world I mean of course we have one ontologically speaking and socially speaking we have one identity but are we aware of our single identity that's very difficult maybe it requires years of psychoanalysis I don't know but we're aware of our dispersed identities according to a specific social setting and we adapt according to different experiences so I mean that my guess or I don't know one thought is that in the future we will be even using more dispersed digital identities and we will be so trained and used in changes through different platforms, different softwares that will become natural to us to change and it will be maybe become so much natural to us that we will think will be thinking directly algorithmically ourselves so we won't be able to understand that now we're using different software or it will be natural for us Any other final thoughts on this? This big change that we are into is considered market driven but I think that I can feel some this kind of resisting data obfuscating data and maybe there is I heard about a software named trackminnow that is maybe there is a kind of it will be a kind of you know individual empowerment