Tech Trend: Digital Identity

By Ethan Lyon, Senior Writer

Definition
Every social network serves a specific purpose… LinkedIn is for professional development, Twitter is for sharing information, Facebook is for life-casting, MySpace is for music sharing, etc. Many of us form a specific identity for each community we are a part of. For instance, we would not share personal information on LinkedIn that we would on Facebook. Moreover, we would have to participate on each platform separately. To regain some consistency and order in the social sphere, we are increasingly turning to web-based management services.

Elements
Consistency — Many internet user’s digital identity is fragmented across several digital platforms. To regain a sense of identity, web users are turning to digital management tools to add consistency to their social profile.
Convenience — Managing three or four social networking profiles can be a full-time job. It’s time-consuming to engage in meaningful discussions and build new connections within so many communities. Management tools are not only adding consistency to our online networking profiles, but also convenience. No longer are our social idenitites mutually exclusive — dashboards enable us to see big picture and effectively manage our digital identities.

Examples
Tumblr — The micro-blogging site enables users to work across multiple social platforms. Users can push their updates to their Facebook page and Twitter profile whenever they post to Tumblr. Therefore, users can build content on multiple social platforms without the chore and redundancy of re-posting.
HootSuite — While Tumblr enables users to manage across multiple social platforms, HooteSuite is a dashboard for one — Twitter. Twitter API managers like HooteSuite help Twitter users bring some organization and order to their digital profile.
SMS Gmail — The inbox is not just a place for sending mail. Google Gmail Labs has added several features to make the inbox a central communication platform. From video conferencing to SMS to instant messaging, Gmail is no longer just for mail, it’s growing into an information and communication hub.

Prediction
As our digital identities become more important, more services will be aggregated into one place. Our prediction is the primary source of communication and information will be in our inboxes. In other words, our inboxes will become identity management hubs. No longer is mail just e-mail, it’s video, texting, tweets and updates.

Read the rest of the consumer tech trends here.

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Image by Davide Guglielmo from Stock.Xchng

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