One of the benefits of having two older teenage sons is that they provide a wealth of insight into emerging patterns of technology use -- particularly as relate to social and collaborative trends. So, I asked my 17 year old son the other day "How do you use profile pages to understand things about people -- you know, to get a grip on their identity?" His answer: "I don't. Profiles are useless. I look at what they are saying, who's talking with them, and what those other people are saying about them."
Identity is about what you DO and WITH WHOM.
This conversation was brought back to my mind recently by the new Dan Ariely book The Upside of Irrationality, in which he makes a good case (among others) that using a profile to understand a person's identity is like "trying to understand how a cookie will taste by reading its nutrition label."
I've written on this topic from a couple of other perspectives a few times (link here and here), but the topic took on new relevancy and urgency when Cisco announced Quad this week. Quad is an integrated communication and collaboration hub. It looks great, and it seems clear to me that Cisco are on the scent of enterprise collaboration in a way that few others are. There are a lot of cool principles at play in Quad, but here's the one I want to drive home. Cisco has planted a flag in some prime real estate: identity.
Identity is the central datum of the human co-operating system.
Identity helps me interpret things from you. Identity helps me filter the things I send to you. And, Identity is shaped by all those interactions, too. Quad allows Cisco to incubate identity from all our communications and collaborations, which enhances our ability to communicate and collaborate in return -- a virtuous cycle. This is a wonderful, big deal. Finally, we have a big player who gets it: the collaborative enterprise needs tools, but the end-game here is a human co-operating system, so it's fundamentally about "person."
