When we go out into the world, we dress ourselves in a manner befitting the way we want the world to perceive us. For a decade, Facebook has been mandating that we can only wear one hat, ever, and never any masks, and services like Google+ have followed suit.
While I'm glad that Zuckerberg has finally admitted that one might want to change hats or put on a mask, I don't think it would be wise to just leave it all up to him, or any other person that has no vested interest in your online identity. It has to be something no one else can control but you.
It was originally intended as a mildly subversive method of getting people to create pubkeys, in the hope that creating a Web Of Trust out of that later would be easier. Despite those very-long-term goals, the signing feature would have been useful on its own. The benefits of a technique like this is that it's 100% in the hands of the person making the posts, even if it doesn't solve some of the usual problems with GPG and the WoT. I think it could be made transparent enough for most people to use, too.
It was somewhat inspired by the "tripcodes" used on by some 4chan-like forums. Ideally, it would have been literal gpg message signing (for compatibility with existing tools), but would have defined a few ways of representing the signed messages, such that you could "sign" a <textarea> on during form submission, with various ways available to sign the text.
For compatibility with existing forums (that might transform "\n" to "<br>", etc, we can sign the text after stripping whitespace, newlines, and HTML tags (and doing the same when verifying), wrapped with
* straight "gpg --clearsign" headers because why not, even if its ugly with the huge "-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED..."
* some sort of VERY truncated form such as a "{@SignedBy: 0xDEADBEEF}" or even just "{@S:DEADBEEF}" or whatever replacing the usual markers, attempting to not annoy people as much.
Or, with minor server assistance that could be advertised as available in a <meta> tag (or even a special class on the <form>):
* the signature itself could be added to an <input type="hidden">, that the server transforms into something like this, with the tag itself becoming the "-----BEGIN..." headers:
<li class="signed signing-method-dataattr" data-authorkey="DEADBEEF" data-signature="HASHBLAH...">
...
</li>
<li class="signed signing-method-divtag">
<div class="signed-key-id" style="display:none;">DEADBEEF</div>
<div class="signed-signature" style="display:none;">HASHBLAH...</div>
<div class="signed-message">...</div>
</li>
This lets you know that a post is indeed by the same person you saw previously, which has a lot of utility, even if it cannot be shown WHO that person is. It would even work between websites, with no extra work required by anybody. MitM isn't a huge issue, because it would require the person in the middle to intercept 100% of the posts or a discrepancy will be seen by the clients. Key identity doesn't matter, because it is only connecting posts as having a common author, making no claim about WHO that author is.
Extension of this to all the usual GPG features is obviously possible, but is left out not only for simplicity of implementation, but also to keep the tool simple, hopefully avoiding the "...but GPG is too complicated!" problem.
Unfortunately, actually sketching out a spec and implementing a prototype has been... slow. I'm familiar with GPG and firefox extensions only as a user, and trying to read RFC 4880 has used up far more time than expected. sigh
Really wish I had more time and energy for this, as it could solve a lot of problems, and if it caught on, extending it in the obvious ways combined with stuff like FOAF* could remove much of the need for monolithic, walled-garden "social networks". Instead, we would simply have "the internet", but with as much identify-checking as people want to provide.
At least if you say it while wearing a mask of pseudonymity or anonymity, you can shed the identity itself and grow another. And if you choose to defame homosexuals, people could look to see if you were wearing your corporate CEO hat or your religious zealot hat at the time--or even note that you do, in fact, consider them to be separate hats--before boycotting any chicken sandwich restaurants.
People do erect cubicle walls within their own psyche. Hardly anyone has a monolithic personality that is presented for all possible occasions. Many of the people who do have engaged in a lifelong pursuit of introspective remodeling to get there, as with a Buddhist monk who has trained himself to show equal respect to a homeless drunk as he shows to sober heads of state. Most everybody else would prefer to keep several different personas on file, to be used at need, including the persona that we show to no one at all.
The Facebook strategy to date is only serving the universal public persona. And that's really only suitable when no one on it actually knows anyone else. The instant any two pepole have an actual personal connection, the invasion of their privacy begins.
That's a pretty great observation. Google+ isn't BAD, it's just the same as everything else.
LiveJournal really doesn't get the credit it deserves for doing so much of what we'd now call 'social media' - and learning how to do it reasonably well - before the bigger players moved in.
I suspect that it was bought by a non-US company plays a large part in the lack of recognition - outside of 'Soviet Russia' jokes, it doesn't really fit the dominant narrative to have an innovative company not be American.
(Even if all the innovation was actually driven by the American user base and development teams.)
Anyway, it seems that nothing actually happened. Somebody was naive enough to believe that company thats power is in ability to show right ads because of knowing oh-so-much about you can possibly stop worrying about who you are at all. Well, fine. I guess all of it could be shortened to "Moot is dreaming".
I wrote up some thoughts on Snapchat's mainstreaming of anonymity/ephemerality a few months ago -- and believe there are huge opportunities out there for people who will go where Facebook/Google won't: http://chrishateswriting.com/post/67378144174/ephemerality-g...
In other words, back to the good old days.
Now if we could just cut the cord between these companies and our identities permanently.