ShowYourself is a simple to make, easy, free and fun utility to help establish your identity across the web. Have a Flickr account and a Facebook and AIM? Combine all your profiles on the web into one attractive widget that you can put on your blog, your
"The Obama application puts the most recent campaign video and news on your profile and in front of your friends. It also enables you to easily communicate with your friends in early primary states where support for Barack is especially important..."
I was talking with a friend of mine today who is a senior at a technology-centered high school in California. Dylan Field and his friends are by no means representative of US teens but I always love his perspective on tech practices... As someone who has argued about the challenge of Twitter being public (to all who hold power over teens), What Dylan is pointing out is that the issue is that Facebook is public (to everyone who matters) and Twitter can be private because of the combination of tools AND the fact that it's not broadly popular. My guess is that if Twitter does take off among teens and Dylan's friends feel pressured to let peers and parents and everyone else follow them, the same problem will arise and Twitter will become public in the same sense as Facebook. This of course raises a critical question: will teens continue to be passionate about systems that become "public" (to all that matter) simply because there's social pressure to connect to "everyone"?
Millions in the UK are already registered with Facebook, or similar social networking tools such as MySpace, Bebo and Friendster, to conduct part of their private lives online, and it's growing at a huge rate.
R. Gross, A. Acquisti, and H. Heinz. WPES '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society, page 71--80. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2005)