Institute For The Future

Virtual diasporas & identity management

Last year, Kathi Vian and I wrote a piece on new diasporas and identity management for the Ten Year Forecast program. Our basic premise was that we are all migrants, and we carry our identities with us as we move. In the coming decade, we will see the proliferation of tools, services and processes of managing our identities.

We made an important distinction between diasporas as a dispersed group of people who share a common origin, a common culture, and a common set of values, and NEW diasporas – a dispersed population that leverages connective technologies to manage shared identity across worlds.

One of the places where we studied new diasporas was online worlds. For example, gamers migrate in herds from one game to another. Many gamers migrated from Ultima to Everquest to abandon it to make World of Warcraft their home. Similarly, there was a mass exodus from MySpace to Facebook.  With the popularity of Twitter skyrocketing, many Facebook users are now moving to Twitter.

Like real world migrants we are trying to manage our identities across these disparate platforms – we are not ready to disassociate ourselves from previous platforms as our friends are still using them, even as we embrace and figure out the new platforms.

Like real world migrants, with the proliferation of platforms our experiences are becoming increasingly fragmented. I seem to be living my own forecast. I use LinkedIn for my professional contacts,  Facebook for friends, family and colleagues, Twitter for staying in touch, sharing what I am up to, and interesting information that I find online. Honestly, it is becoming hard for me to manage my identity across all the multiple platforms. I do use Friendfeed, Tweetdeck and other tools to help me aggregate information. But I still believe that all the tools that are available are good aggregators, but not good at managing your identity. For example, I can’t choose what I can share with whom and on which platform, instead it is automated. They don’t consolidate your friends and contact that you have across platforms into one single account.

As we had hypothesized last year we can clearly see  with the introduction of new tools like cliqset (http://cliqset.com/home) that virtual diasporas are driving new platforms for identity management and value creation. But there is still much more to come for identities to be seamless and fully integrated across platforms.