The article discusses the concept of Anonymous social software and goes on regarding research that has found that using data mining techniques on your social network, one can be personally identified. Pretty interesting. But not surprising. So let’s go back to the concept: Anonymous Social Software. I am not sure I really “follow” the concept. (pun intended).

People who blog anonymously. This I can understand. You can write all on your own, not disclose it is you to anyone and take active steps to not get identified. A great example is Fake Steve Jobs who had quite a run writing a blog without being personally identified. However, without fostering a commenting dialog, I can posit that blogging is not social software, it is simply a publishing platform. Once you begin an interaction (a conversation) do you really enter the realm of social software.

So, can people really be anonymous and use social software. People who want to remain anonymous take strides to not release any more information than they have to not give themselves away. In most cases, this is precisely the opposite of what one tries to accomplish with social software. The point is to interact, to follow. And of course every connection in of itself is additional information that narrows the focus on who you could be. Back on the Fake Steve Jobs, even Daniel Lyons couldn’t not remain anonymous. His writing style alone eventually gave him away.

Another subtle point is the article discussed security and anonymity as if they are one in the same thing. However, security and anonymity are not the same thing nor should they be. Whether identified or not, people want their system and data secure. I am not anonymous writing this article but I want the article to be secure. The same goes for my newsfeed on Facebook or my stream on Twitter. If you want security, use the web privately, private rooms, storage, feeds, etc. Yes, there is the raging “security of cloud computing” conversation going on but that is fully another topic and one which I believe will resolve itself.

The big question people should be asking themselves is why are they trying to remain anonymous? This issue has existed since the days of mainstream message boards and chat rooms. You are going on the web and posting information fully out in the public. A “handle” isn’t security. CEOs of publicly traded grocery store chains even know this.

My view is if you are venturing out and going to interact on the web, you have to have a comfort of living in public. Fred Wilson had a great commentary on this. It is something that everyone posting information should consider. It is much more about your own personal attitude and approach than whether the software/meme should be maintaining your anonymity. Sure many will disagree with me. I’m just not sold that you can have one without the other.

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DALMATIAN : DOG ::

(A) oriole : bird

(B) horse : pony

(C) shark : great white

(D) ant : insect

(E) stock : savings

It seems with growing frequency, I’m pulled into conversations regarding Twitter with many who are just now learning about it.  Great Time article on Twitter by the way.  Yes, I get the often “I just don’t get Twitter.”  I used to think that too when I first heard about the service.  I quickly no longer thought that.  But, recently, I get “Why use Twitter when you can just update your status on Facebook?”  And this throws me right back into the 90′s:  “Do you use the internet?” “Oh yes, I use AOL all the time.”  So back to my SAT analogy:

web : AOL :: Twitter status : Facebook status

Remember the walled garden of AOL, how many users would think that was the web, never venturing out into the wild world of the wide web.  Times change but I see history repeating itself.  The struggle and growing awareness of open and closed systems.  There is a tremendous amount of value being generated off the openness of Twitter than is available within Facebook, where your status network can only be as big who you are willing to have in your personal friends’ list.  The same goes for status in LinkedIn and who you are willing to have in your professional connections’ list.  The situation is certainly more complex than AOL of the 90s but strikingly similar.

Below is a great video about why we have a major data portability problem on our hands and why data portability is needed. I find myself not wanting to investigate or join some of the last new ventures coming out simply because the thought of entering another userid/password, profile and clicking to follow another set of people (who are the same people) makes my blood boil. The latest example is BackType, great concept, aggregating all of your comments everywhere, even aggregating the aggregating blog comments systems out there like Disqus.  So I went halfway, I sign-up and claimed my profile.  But I am not going to go and follow Scoble, Fred Wilson and Brad Feld yet again.  Twitter, Tumblr, Dopplr, Facebook, Disqus or Intense Debate, etc, etc, etc…  No way.

There are ventures trying to clean this up like openID but it is not happening fast enough. Or I should say it isn’t happening anywhere near as fast as new services are hitting the web. I don’t have any doubt that we are collectively going to get there. The question is when. This can not be one of those topics like the FCC opening the wireless spectrum, the promise of mobility or the nirvana of the digital home that will and does go on for years. It has to happen fast. Without it, if I’m getting frustrated with it, then the services we all sing praises about are never going to cross the chasm into the mainstream.

DataPortability – Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut on Vimeo.

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IntenseDebate is one of the major blog commenting platforms out there.  The other is Disqus, the one I use on this blog and one I tend to favor based on overall reliability and feature set.  Both companies clearly get the value of commenting, user-generated content and the real power of conversation aggregation.  But if I were to put the two on a score card on execution, Disqus demonstrates real innovative thinking on how to put an overall platform together and paint their vision of what conversation aggregation can do and how to do it.  This was evidenced by their very early integration into WordPress and Daniel Ha’s continued work to integrate into FriendFeed once they emerged a critical aggregation player as well.

But, what is also clear is WordPress understands the value and importance of the comments on blogs (not that they didn’t before).  And as the major blog platform, WordPress has the value chain power to use this strategic acquisition to emerge as the leader in blogging as well as commenting.  And it is for this simple but important reason, that they acquisition is a huge coup for IntenseDebate in prepping for the future to potentially become the ultimate winner in this segment.  There is a sheer numbers game here and by WordPress rolling Intense’s toolkit out as part of their builds, it will instantaneously deploy Intense’s technology to blogs everywhere.  That removes one key obstacle for Intense that Disqus will continue to have to overcome in order to gain market share:  convincing blog owners to install.  Now, for IntenseDebate, it happens automatically.

Let’s hope that WordPress remains agnostic in their approach to continue to allow third party developers to build, promote and florish inside the WordPress platform.  I would like to continue to remain a Disqus user and expect to see fantastic things from them.  I will be keen to see how Disqus responds because we could be witnessing a business case of value chain integration that will be very tough to withstand.

Since demonstrating the value of Twitter to a number of colleagues a few weeks back, I have seen more and more people I know entering the world of Twitter. Some remain skeptical but are at least giving it a try. This is exactly where I was when I first questioned its value and application (and quickly learned how valuable Twitter could be).

Anyway, over the past few days, I’ve been taking a look at Seesmic more closely, and using the new direct messaging capability which I believe was an absolute must (do not have much interest in contributing out in the public timeline like I do with Twitter). I must say that it is great to see Loic’s team innovating right into the customer feedback.

But there are a couple key issues that Seesmic must get out in front of before they turn into seismic ones. Let’s face it, as cool as video emailing is, using it is flying in the face of years of email com. I’m not sure what the active user number is but I would be shocked if it was very high. There are a couple of reasons for it in my opinion:

- Where is the viral network effect for it? The most successful of start-ups have a key viral play as part of their strategy. If Seesmic has one, it is alluding me. I need a way to invite folks in my network into the conversation.

- As everyone jumps from network play to network play, none of my connections are out of Seesmic. I do not know why this is but it is the case. So unless I want to talk to strangers in the public timeline (which is great way to meet others), it has low utility for me personally.

- Tell me when I have a message waiting in my inbox. This is an absolute must-have feature. Someone direct messaged and I do not get notified in my inbox that I have a message waiting ala Facebook and I cannot subscribe to an inbox RSS feed. Big issue.

- Facilitate growth. Let me direct message a non-member and that will facilitate usage, memberships and traffic. If I direct message someone and they are notified, in most cases, they are going to click through and register to see the message. And some of them will stay continue to video message, participate and invite other friends to partake.

Just some thoughts and perhaps some of these are addressed, and I’m missing them. And perhaps Seesmic is trying to control growth to get their infrastructure footing. But until the above is clearly available, I don’t see the high-flyer tool it has the promise to be.

NOTE (10 p.m. EST): Just made online contact with Cathy from Seesmic. She was extremely responsive both on Seesmic and then tried to come here to comment as well. Just made some comment system changes so hopefully she’ll come back and do so. Looking forward to it! Thanks Cathy and great meeting you.

Facebook continues to impress me as it is still sets the standard as the complete social platform. The news feed is a great feature. And the power of the platform itself, often the topic of discussion and a place where numerous developers have already built into its frameworks. And the group functionality (sometimes) and events calendars have also proven helpful. However, for me, it simply isn’t scoring enough on utility. I only find myself using it once a week, not once an hour. The passing-along karma, the beers with wings, the happy hour invites, the groups for “everything under the sun” has me thinking about the topic of ‘social spam’. And even the amazing pace at which I can consume Scrabulous games has simply starting caused me social software fatigue.

And more social software enters the picture like Tumblr and Seesmic. Each with their unique take and value proposition, a multi-content type micro-blogging service and video email/conversation respectively. It will be interesting to see how each develops traction with their user base. And there are many others which is really incredible. So as these new ventures enter the picture, I ask: Is and should consolidation in this space begin? Will we see the functionality of these ventures merge quicker in the social networking space at the same rapid pace that we saw the new offerings launch at the speed of Web 2.0. Has this consolidation already begun like WordPress launching Prologue earlier this week?

Time will tell. But if I am experience fatigue and I immerse myself in the web everyday, social fatigue must be real. So alas, I find myself back to finding the highest level of utility in LinkedIn, still in my opinion the unheralded social networking site for business use, and Twitter, the social component I had initially questioned its utility but now use throughout the day.

Opinions? Thoughts? Social Energy? Social Fatigue? Yes? No?

[Update 2/1/08:  Jeremiah Owyang commented that he is not currently doing a study on the topic of social fatigue but that it is a trend to watch.]

This brings me to my point (and for the most part, most likely perceived as contrarian), where exactly is the inflection point for a service on where these consumer demands are placed on it. It isn’t because people are paying for it and demand their return on investment, Twitter is free. Shel and Jeremiah both mention the need for a disclosed monetization strategy. Why? I’m trying to think back to 1997 to remember if the public demanded similar things of Google before the nascent ad words marketplace was disclosed.

Now, to be clear, I am not taking an investor’s view here, if I was Fred Wilson and Union Square Ventures, I would want to be sure Biz and team had a plan for platform scalability and a long term monetization plan before I invested a few million. But my view is consumers do not share that same right. Can they vote with their feet and go to competing services? Of course and that is their choice.

But the bigger question is bigger than Twitter alone. As consumers, how much should we expect and demand from ‘free’ services? And what is the point in which we should expect services to take the next step in maturation, having pre-conceived notions about their evolution or even their ultimate goal as a service?

I am not a full time social software guy, I work full time.  Social software are tools I use to communicate my thoughts and collaborate with others.   And there is no way to tie them together.  Why can I not have a tool that allows me to editorially select which of my Tumbles into my WordPress blog, correlate where I have most of my serious contextual posts.  It would be great to tie them together.  My sense if I don’t find a way to merge my posting with some editorial decisions soon, I’m going to have to shut down my tumbling because I simply do not have the time to bounce around.  That would be unfortunate because the Tumblr interface does afford me an easier blogging interface than WordPress and more flexibility than Twitter.  Anyway fully move their blogging over to Tumblr completely?  Seems to be a tough proposition for those who are blogging on a particular theme on one of the standard blogging platforms.