I have been on Facebook for a while now and it seems like there are a lot of people out there who are also using this global social network website (750 millions at last counts). It is fair to say that even if it is falling short of some requirements (privacy) and expectation that some may have, it became one of if not the phenomenon of this decade. Mark has been very productive in the last few years and came up with some ideas on how this little baby of his should be.

From the closed college network to the global worldwide reach that it has now, Facebook has managed to gather a crowd of people that would deliberately give their private information so that they could be interacting with other friends using the same website. What is the initial attraction or the reason you were forced to get on it, it does not really matter; in the end you ended up pouring your data into it.

The one aspect that is slowly crawling out of this global user database is the notion of Real ID. And to most the lambda users this does not mean much as they do not see the point of using anything else but their real first and last name as well as other personal information on this website. After all, what would be the point of not showing that this is “me”, I would not be able to connect to my friends then and they would not be able to find me or interact with me?

And that’s how it all started, the initial requirement to connect to Facebook was to have an email address form the university in order to connect, this ensured that all the users where unique and they would be who they said they are. This created a fixed and reliable base of users that would then send invitation to their friends that they would know and thus increasing the reliability of the initial database. The fact that you can now open an account on Facebook with any name or email address does not really matter, because the large majority of the users are who they claim to be offline.

Then the concept of “connect with Facebook” appeared, a simple API that one could use on a website and that would enable you to use Facebook as your login and password to website and thus avoid the creation of a profile every time you want to be identified on some forum or write a comment somewhere.

This is a first step and it will be quickly be followed by another one, the possibility to use your profile as an identifier for online payment, a bit like paypal but with a lot more information linked to it. This would reinforce both the uniqueness of the user and the fidelity to Facebook. There is already a credit system that has been implemented for in-games such as farmville and from there a link with your credit card information is not far fetched.

However that is not what can be seen as the last step, you see a RealID is more than just a way to make login and online payment easier, it is also an international and up to date passport, with your personal information, your picture, your tastes and most importantly your friend network. If somehow everyone on the internet ends up with a RealID and you have made your profile private, you are still in the system, and it can still be used to give you access to websites and make payments. What would prevent Facebook from using this information to provide some others sort of service, like profiling data to use by paying customer?

The obvious case is targeted marketing where the data is used to try to sell you good or services that correspond to your profile, the advertising on your screen would be only what interests you and the product would look at your age rage, friends, relationships, history, family, holiday location, drinks, movies, hobbies even job and colleagues… But that is already in place, and Google is on the same track with the data they can collect from your emails and google+. That is what they are also trying to accomplish and there is no point in trying to deny it. However, since the human mind is twisted, let’s see what we can come up with if we push the envelope.

Let’s say that you want to apply somewhere for a job, you’d have a choice to login using your Facebook ID to fill in your application online or send it by the old mail or even better, a pigeon. The result would be that people would probably use their Facebook ID to log on. Then in the background, a service build by Facebook runs a check on you, on your friend list, the comments you posted, the pictures where you’ve been tagged.  This is compared to some predefined criteria and taken into account and even before your posted profile is filed to the company, your application can be rejected by the systems.

The HR resource does not even see the reason why the application is refused; on their end they just gave the criteria to Facebook to filter results according to their “company policy”. The check is done in the background and the result is a simple accepted or refused. A fee would be requested to companies using this service allowing you to pre-select candidates.

Of course this would probably kill Facebook or Google right on the spot if they allow such a use of personal data for discrimination purposes. However this type of check must already be done for some sensitive position such as government security or politically sensitive jobs.

However the concept of a real ID on the web can make sense for a lot of services and has been in the work for a while with the Open ID initiative. The concept is to provide a single log in and password that would work on multiple web site however there would just be a minimum amount of personal data attached to this ID. It is obvious what is the problem is with this one, you can have as many open ID as you want thus making the uniqueness of these IDs highly questionable.

Google is trying to request people to use their real name on google+ to prevent multiple profile from being created, it has not been welcomed by most of the defendant of personal privacy and I can understand why to some extend.

I am certain that one day we will all have a unique or at least as far as acceptable, unique ID system that will be used on the internet and will enable us to go to any online shop, forum, cloud storage and other services requiring to provide a unique identifier to grant you access to your data. This real ID should however remain impersonal and only used by you. You may display whatever name or pseudo you want on those site.

Imagine if you could be sure that you can block one spammer for good on your incoming mailbox, whatever email address he or she  is using, or that you can be sure that the items your are selling to someone on craigslist are to someone you trust because you know it is the same person as the one on eBay. When you are purchasing an application or a game, no need to input a key in or to have it attached only to a single machine, you can just use your RealID during the purchase and it would be automatically be valid the moment you log on. You don’t need to know who the users are or what they look like or how they are feeling in the morning, just that this particular user is not the same as the other one.

Maybe that could happen with the IPv6 where each one of us would receive a unique IP for ourselves this would be allocated to the machine we are on, the moment we use our RealID to log on… or something along those line. It should not be compulsory to access information and the it should remain remain as anonimous as possible if the user wants to.

That last point is the one that is causing all the problem in the current discussions. What happens in countries where free speech is not allowed? The moment a RealID is imposed, there is no way for those people to post, write, comment on anything that the regime would consider illegal and that would result in them beeing persecuted for. Therefore the option should remain possible not to use this RealID system and just make it a very attractive option to use with the possible signs that this or this user is using RealID but some others don’t. Not an easy task but one that has been growing in a box for a long time and just starts to crawl out.

So, for the time beeing the RealID concept is still fragmented and until it is unified into a single all purpose standard, this question will remain open. I would be using it for the conveniences that I mentioned before but I wouldn’t wand to be tagged and followed whatever I do or say on the web. Same as real life, if I apply for a loan I’ll give you my ID to check my credit rate, if I ask for direction in the street, you don’t need to know I’m a fan of DaftPunk and that I enjoy eating chocolate while watching Games of Thrones…

We would like to more particularly thank our witnesses and  my sister who have all been very helpful before and during the whole day. But again thank you all for making this day a very special one!!!

Some moments are better be celebrated twice.

So first a little cocktail party with some colleagues and then a full blown roman arena fights with your friends.

That was how my sweetheart celebrated her last birthday and with a little visit from her dad to crown the day it was really was worth an empire ;-)

This happened at an ATM in Brussels belonging to then BKCP bank. I wonder where the reset button is…

After those two days in France we took the car to drive back and stopped to a hotel on Sunday night to spend the night and enjoy the “wellness” center that they have on Monday. Aside from the fact that we were the only customer that they had that night, I can honestly tell you that it was worth it, sauna, swimming, pool, nice breakfast and lunch. Overall, the whole 3 days have been absolutely great.

After looking for almost an hour for a place to park the car, that is also part the Paris city life, we spent a good restful night at the hotel that I had found online. We had typical french break-fast the next day in a cafe not too far from where we stayed, with bread and croissants that you can only find in France.

The rest of the day we spent in Louvre where we where surrounded by ancient Egyptian, Roman and Greek artifacts. A little trip to the other side of the building gave us a chance to peek at the Mona Lisa, always very popular, and finish by exploring what remains of Napoleon III apartments. Overall, a very nice week end.

I admire Francis Ford Coppola as a producer of some very influential movies like the Godfather, Apocalypse now, Dracula, Sleepy Hollow, Lost in Translation and the Good Shepherd. But I have gained even more admiration from the interview he gave on the99percent.com where he is putting some things back in context to further fuel the current crusade that is currently taking place on the internet today.

How does an aspiring artist bridge the gap between distribution and commerce?
We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.

This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?

In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it.

I don’t say that I agree but it certainly deserve credit from a producer as talented as he is to actually look at the current state of the industry and just ask if we should not just go back to basics instead of trying to develop this model further than where it is at the risk of making it lose its initial purpose, entertain us.

I have to say that as a storyteller or game master, whichever you prefer, my friends are usually making sure that I have to use my imagination as much as possible to make them into some sort of coherent group. But this time they really went above their previous record. The team had a barbarian human (very Conan like), a Rogue (in other worlds a thief), a sorcerer and “drum rolls” a Modron!! for those of you who have no idea what that is, imagine a one meter cube with four arms, two legs and denizen of a mechanical plane of existence fully devoted to logic and order.

By throwing the right events, I managed to put them together and they explored, well more like cleaned their way through a dungeon and defeated the evil creatures that had killed a previous group of self declared adventurers from a little village.

I cannot wait for the next time, so I should probably start to organize it. There is something nice about having your friend around the table having fun and spending a nice time at the expense of some imaginary fiends.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!!

Best Wishes for 2011!