Facebook, UC, and Identity

(I made it my goal this summer to blog more – so here are my thoughts of the week…)

Last week I attended the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, MA. I was at one panel about Unified Communications and federation on the last day where I asked the panel the following question:

Identity is very important for Unified Communications and Collaboration. What is the future of identity? Is it the Facebook model – a single identity with extensive customizable security rules? Or multiple identities consolidated in a single client?

I’ve been an advocate, manager, policy maker, and implementor of Unified Communication and also collaboration and other syncronous tools as Instant Messaging/Chat for customers so this question has been top of mind for me.  The chat world has historically seen users have multiple accounts – one for each circle of IM/Chat partners. Email is the same – most of us have both work and personal accounts at a minimum.

Our onlines selves mirror our offline selves when it comes to identity and image – we all have multiple personality disorder. Culturally, we present ourselves differently to different social circles. Close friends and family may know every up and down, but to that loose ring of acquaintances we project only the image we want them to see, to our co-workers we focus on a professional image, and perhaps to our weekend softball team a separate person as well. We can have as many images and online identities as we have social circles.

Facebook has introduced an interesting perspective into the future of our online identities. Zuckerberg has mentioned in multiple interviews that he sees Facebook not just as a competitor to MySpace, but as a new platform for all communications – to replace email, IM, SMS and more. (Facebook is already on your phone – its not hard to imagine actually making a phone call to a friend through Facebook sometime down the road)

Facebook announced new privacy rules this week designed to let users micromanage each status post, photo update, and more. Already Facebook had included powerful privacy settings that let users structure groups and otherwise customize who is able to see various pieces of content ranging from fully public to a small ad-hoc list of friends. The new rules most notably add the ability to be fully public with an update – the analogy being twitter.

By integrating these privacy features more clearly in the basic interface facebook is continuing on feature path and philosophy of single-identity, manged by security. The idea is you can be all of your multiple personality disorders, all in one tool. No need to have separate accounts – if the whole world joins Facebook, we can all manage our online identities in a single place (Facebook, of  course).

Identity management is an important concern with Unified Communications implementations . This is because you can’t have unified communications and collaboration unless you are the ’same person’ on your email, IM, phone, video conference system, and web conference system. The concept of single-sign on is not new to the business world – many IT shops have this infrastructure already. Adding additional systems (such as web-conferencing or phone) is a relatively minor issue.

But Unified Communication(UC) using the Facebook model presents not a technical issue but a cultural one. Many UC tools talk about extending unified messaging or other features to the mobile or even home phone. The Palm Pre is targeting their advertisement campaign to be the phone to manage both your work life and your personal life. Its clear that telework and mobile devices have blurred the boundaries of personal and work life. And UC presents the case to integrate all communications devices in employees lives into a seamless platform for communication – does that mean we will have a single identity for both work and personal?

Certainly gives a new meaning to the idea of Facebook in the enterprise…