I’m Here. No I’m Not

“Who am I? Why am I here?”

Admiral James Stockdale, Vice Presidential candidate, October 13, 1992

Is it the power of the individual, the power of the network or the power of commerce that shapes the Internet? Surely it is all three, for like art or politics, the Internet is full of amateur and professional expressionists who attract camp followers, adherents and adversaries. The Web is equally defined by the multiplicity of product offers that have given leverage to buyers who can meet the transactional requirements of sellers of products, services and information.

Given our focus on customer intelligence and Web analytics, what is grudgingly coming clear to the world of commerce are the distinctions between social presence and identity, and the rules of buying versus selling on the Internet. Business would like rules to some day become pervasive: a uniform identity attached to presence, not only to authenticate purchasers but also to provide tips to demographics for opportunities to cross sell and up sell in the name of customer service.

But the vast majority of Web users expect both presence and anonymity for anything short of a financial transaction. (Official transactions can also occur without the exchange of money, the quid pro quo being the exchange of my information for yours.) After all, it’s assumed that you can walk through a retail store and interact without overtly identifying yourself. It’s precisely why CANSPAM was created and legal opinions have steadily fallen on the side of the consumer.

And now, with the advent of social networks, the “consumer” can also be the seller. When political oddity James Stockdale ran for the White House with Ross Perot, he presaged the private, social and commercial sides of the Internet with his apocryphal quote: “Who am I? Why am I here?” Stockdale wasn’t out to buy anything but he was surely selling something. We’ve seen what the Web has done since for the campaigns of Al Gore, Barack Obama and notably Ron Paul, an obscure outsider who raised more than $4 million online in a one-day appeal to non-traditional contributors.

Today, presence with relative anonymity is being syndicated by making information and applications portable across social Web sites including Facebook, Ning, Yahoo (planned) and MySpace, who have newly announced they will allow users to piggyback lists of connections and content and port that information to different social Web sites. The quid pro quo here is portable content for users in exchange for allowing services to maintain some connection with their users as they surf other sites on the Web. Google has its own take, not through the creation of a social network, but through Friend Connect and Open Social, which allow users to embed applications from social sites into any Web page.

Compare this development (or Stockdale’s moment) with a quote from Deloitte’s new Predictions 2008 report which addressed the transition from anonymity to authenticity: ”It is often argued that one of the great benefits of the Web is anonymity. However in 2008, there may be an increasing clamor, from regulators, users and online traders, for the Internet to provide authenticated identity every time people undertake any transaction via the Web. A move to process online authentication could ultimately be good for both business and users.”