Identity, social graphs and engagement

I may have dreamt it. 

Sometimes in the flow of reading even a hyper-connected gent like myself can mis-place a valuable insight-laden scrap of information. Usually between Delicious and Google I can lay my virtual mits on anything I read within minutes a most. 

But not this one… 

A while ago I thought I read that a community manager for Reuters or a similar organisation had talked about using the social graph of commenters to prove that they were real people people and not spammers looking to drop links or sundry crappiness into a discussion. The idea was that your social graph – say your Facebook Connect profile – proves that you are a real person. 

(If you know what I mean – please do mail/txt/Tweet me… I would love to read about it again.)

It’s a really fascinating idea. The flipside of the erosion of privacy perhaps, is that what you do online, the graph/web footprint/web shadow you create can prove who you are. 

Reputation as an identity credit rating, sort of… 
The other thing that having an online identity does, of course, if you display it, is make you a little bit more polite. Trolls tend to prefer anonymity – they moistly don’t like it when their friends/family/employers can see the vileness of their online hating laid bare. 

Via Mr Tinworth I see that Typepad have data showing that if you can sign in to a system with your identity from elsewhere you’re more likely to leave a comment. Very true, and many’s the time I’ve given up on leaving a comment on a Moveable Type platform after growing weary of trying to prove my un-bottishness… As Typepad put it: 

“Based on some impressive performance on the beta blogs, we have added a few popular social web icons — TypePad, Facebook, and Twitter — on the comment forms. We tested this design in beta for a few weeks and saw a dramatic increase in the commenting activity. By encouraging people to sign in and become a “real” person, we have seen a significant increase in comments.”

Posted via email from Antony’s posterous

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