connect.

"People have an innate desire to connect with other people and share information."

~ Mark Zuckerberg, founder/CEO of Facebook

When I first read this line in an article in this month's GQ I found sticking out of my mailbox this evening I wanted to dismiss it. No they don't. But yes we do. Case in point = this blog. And the millions of other blogs. But maybe less obvious, writers of all sorts. The kind writing about their own life experiences centuries past and still today. And on and on. It is quite literally endless the different ways we display this need to share and to connect. We are human afterall. And of which of course we all do in our own ways and up to our own defined limits. There are those who share everything (and not just thoughts but their IM, email even physical addresses, mobile numbers and the like) and those who are less inclined. This is obvious and well-known.

What struck me a bit later in the article was Zuckerberg's confession to somehow trying to harness all this sharing and shape people's willingness to share even more in the future so much in fact that the future of Facebook (in other words, to keep it from becoming the next Friendster) depends on it. Case in point here would be the News Feed feature, which broadcasts user's activity on their friend's home pages. This actually was met with widespread user protest when it was first implemented, but is now in fact one of the most touted features on the site. What Zuckerberg has on his hands with his social experiment (on the scale of 115 million users and counting – fast) – what he calls the "social graph" – is quite possibly the most valuable database of consumer information in the history of mankind: everything that is, and ever has been, posted to his site by its users.

It reminds me of nuclear power, and how Carl Sagan points out how the same technology that allowed us to walk on the moon and send spacecraft four billion miles into our galaxy and realms of which we had only ever dreamt is the same technology that was used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In other words, this unbelievably vast treasure trove of consumer data could be used rather harmlessly or even perhaps in a way that benefits those same users (Amazon's and Netflix's recommended lists, Apple's Genius feature in iTunes, and on and on – targeted marketing is by no means a new concept). On the other hand, it could also be used – in the wrong hands or with the wrong intentions – to create some sort of Orwellian scenario in which all web content we view is completely determined by user targeting. We would find ourselves in a world dominated by advertising, where advertising would play a key role in the creation of most of what we see and by extension the information put in front of us.

That may be extreme, or it may not. Zuckerberg is launching (albeit gradually, on the heals of his last disaster Beacon) Connect. What Connect is promising to do (and so far it only works with a handful of sites, such as CNN, MoveOn, CBS and others) is – by logging in to Facebook once – everywhere you go on the web after that your login will travel with you. Websites will be able to use your Facebook info (of course, only what you provide) to tailor its content to suit you. Of course, this could be awesome - the potential of course is to have just one sign-on point and seamless access to your data everywhere you go. Or it could find itself encroaching on privacy ideas of which we have not yet or cannot let go. How much is too much? Or, how far is too far? What information would Connect provide who knows who? Granted, as I already mentioned, it can only provide as much as you provide. And to Zuckerberg's credit, he does say he intends to allow users a granular level of control of what information is shared (as is evident currently on the site). But he has also – in the past, with experiments like Beacon – displayed a tendency to interpret privacy as he sees fit and deals with the consequences after they are incurred.

Regardless of any opinion one way or another, the kid makes some interesting arguments and it is interesting stuff. But irregardless –  I will never, ever bring myself to update my FB status.