Music + Technology + Random Nonsense from the Music Industry, by Ethan Kaplan

I, like everyone immediately jumped on the phenomenon (or not) that is Google Buzz. A real time stream of information that showed up in over a hundred million Gmail boxes, promising to add a further dimension to the information and social framework Google is trying to create with profiles, GTalk, Android, etc.

And all I could think after trying this out is: what a fucking mess Google is.

My problems with Buzz though go deeper than just Buzz but extend to the collasal mess that is Google in general.

To Google, I have one or many identities:

ethankap [@] gmail.com – a free account

ethan [@] blackrimglasses.com – a free apps account

ethan.kaplan [@] warnerbrosrecords.com – a paid account, only for docs usage and mailing lists

and one other which I’m not putting up, also paid.

But these identities are not tied in any way. To some apps, the “gmail.com” account is the primary. To others, like on the phone, I can use either of these accounts. My Google public profile is using the gmail account, but I don’t use that account for email, just for Google “accounts” (YouTube, etc).

You see how this gets confusing. Who am I to Google? I don’t really know. I have Google Docs in many places, none tied together. I have to invite myself to documents depending on the mode of editing.

Now, to Google Buzz. Google Buzz shows up and unlike what Twitter was like, somehow I followed people and people followed me. Who were they? Where did they come from? Were they real or not? Which account was this tied to? I don’t use ethankap [@] gmail.com, so why is it now the center of my realtime identity.

Is Twitter or Facebook more real than this anyhow? Is Twitter my hub, or is Google now, or is Facebook, or my blog or hell, posterous? Where is the real me?

The promise of real time, the promise of digitized identity is to unify the presentation of self into one representation. That hasn’t happened. I’m left instead with a fragmented variety of self that cross syndicate but somehow operate on their own volition. I have no clue who is following me on FourSquare vs. Twitter. I know the repercussions of actions on them all, but not why that occurs.

With every new service, we fragment ourselves again and start another social web either based around utility, ontology or transient interest. The EthanKap I am is fragmented all over the place, and it doesn’t seem to be up to me to state which is real. Google tried to do that for me. I control Twitter to a greater extent, but Facebook decided without telling me to limit the amount of people I saw in my feed. Am I now limited from those I thought I was cultivating as “friends?”

Google Buzz is a necessary step for Google. Google is a machine intelligence which only gives information in response to the complexity of the information it ingests. It needs this feed to make itself smarter. A robot seeking food basically.

However it is not a necessary step for me.

What is the answer? I don’t think its Facebook Connect. I don’t know if its OpenID or Activity Stream standards. We need some way of separating ourselves out of our fragmented self. A protocol to raise up our social graphs to the level of self ownership. An RFC for Me.

So until then, we will Follow and UnFollow, Add and Friend. But the more fragmented the Self, the less relevant it is to the reality of who we are. The more we connect, the more we put up the walls of the panopticon, the more we trust that there is someone always in the guard tower.

For our sake I hope we’re right, or it’s a lonely world of friends indeed.