My boss forwarded me a Nielsen link yesterday that talked about online socializers:

But with the increasing number of resources available, it’s difficult to know what you should believe or take at face value. Socializers – those who spend 10 percent or more of their online time on social media – feel this effect more than others do. When asked, 26 percent feel that there is too much information available on the Internet, compared to 18 percent of people who predominantly use portals and just 5 percent of people who primarily use search engines.

But why does too much information lead one to use social media as a navigation tool? The short answer: Socializers trust what their friends have to say and social media acts as an information filtration tool. This is key because Socializers gravitate towards and believe what is shared with friends and family. If your friend creates or links to the content, then you are more likely to believe it and like it. And this thought plays out in the data.

Increasingly, I’ve been having to filter down what I look at because the net is just catching too much stuff.  My blogroll is pretty massive and it takes some time to get through — I’ve had to remove some of the more spammy blogs like DCist, Engadget, etc.

The Nielsen article differentiates between searchers and socializers (searchers tending to be less active socially online, using search engines to find content).  But what if we could combine searching with social trust?

Various obstacles have blocked an identity layer online, but none moreso than peoples’ demands for privacy.  Privacy is used haphazardly as a way to ensure trust.  That is, we protect ourselves in public by restricting who has access to us to only family and friends.  But this is not “trust” per se — it’s obfuscation.  But internet trends such as collaborative wikis, Netflix ratings, and tagging show that open trust systems can provide much more information than small, closed networks.  They open themselves up to abuse but with just a few people and a few tools to manage that abuse, the systems can be massive gains for public knowledge.

[By the way, as a related aside, for my Yahoo!/ISD fellowship research, I wrote a paper talking about the meaning of "privacy" and what is currently happening online with regards to how the US and the advancing BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) are dealing with openness and closedness.]

What we are heading towards is some brutal endgame with respect to personal data:  Facebook has been developing a pretty complex privacy infrastructure but it is being lambasted both from security people for exposing too much data and from internet geeks who want portable identities and data that they can use across social networks.

Certainly underlying all this is fear of government monitoring.  The Patriot Act under Bush (and probably under Obama too) has disgustingly blurred the lines between lazy domestic surveillance and strict burden of proof for court orders.  Until the government can reassert that it must require a lot of evidence and court approval (perhaps involving a watchdog representative too) to start spying on someone (not just American citizens), the prospect of freeing up personal data online must be tempered.

But imagine if we could sort out all these issues and build up a proper trusted network online for reputation and identities, ensured by a public trust and not by a for-profit company or by the government?  What if we could ensure transparency not only for individuals but also upon governments and companies?  What I feel is missing in the debate about “big federal government” is that companies have become as powerful or in some cases more powerful than governments.  Unions and large public organizations as well.  Transparency and accountability are not popular ideas across the board.

But I look forward to a day when I can do what should be mundane tasks.  I went to a get-together with mainly girls once, and they were playing with jdate, the dating service for Jews.  They were searching only for guys who had Master’s degrees or above.  And they got the results and were disappointed with men who appeared to me to be absolute all-stars:  doctors, good-looking, wealthy, fun guys.  But the girls were practically yawning.

What if I could search across Amazon for only people who’ve read over 200 books?  What if I could look for opinions on Afghanistan only from bloggers who have served a tour there in the Marines?  What if I could find Digg articles from people who have had at least one child and who own a camera I’m looking at?  What if I could filter out my Twitter follow list so I only view tweets from those with at least 100 users and who post at least 3 times a day and who have had over 20 of their tweets voted upwards?

What of serendipity?  Well, the random public lifestream will still be there.  But I want to be able to filter across networks and across siloed databases.

And sure, not everyone will want to share all this information with the world.  They should have the right not to.  But what about those of us who want to opt-in and start using all this data to make our lives better and to be able to use our reputation and others in order to make better decisions?

As we connect more real-time nodes onto the internet, we’re able to do more and more impressive things.  I can hardly wait until the entire world is blanketed in real-time nodes sending data to the internet to be mashed up.

Clive Thompson’s always thought-provoking notes in Wired Magazine this month covered the real-time web, quoting Edo Segal:

Edo Segal, a pioneer in real-time search, thinks the field is going to explode as updates become more automatic, with our devices autoreporting where we are, how we’re feeling, and what we’re doing and seeing. Old-school search will never vanish, but real-time news will create a society where we have an omnipresent sense of the moment. “Google organized our memory,” Segal says. “Real-time search organizes our consciousness.”

One of my favorite Twitter tools so far has been Trendsmap.  It shows the trending topics in different regions of the world.  As of Sunday evening (11PM eastern), you can see what the world (or what little of it is represented on Twitter and Trendsmap so far) cares about.  Click the images for larger versions.

Damn, all we’re using Twitter for is to share our feelings about football?

AMERICA.

I barely ever read fiction.  My general take on that has been that there’s so much interesting out in the world, past and present, that I’m always trying to catch up and learn more just to keep my pulse on things.  While the internet (and heavy computing) has made the present much more accessible and tangible to us, it has also unlocked the past and given us better predictive tools of the future.  But the past and future still remain a blend of fiction and non-fiction, since what is history is often both myth and fact, and what is future is often speculative even if it’s predicted with extrapolated trends.

One comparison I think about is Plato versus Aristotle in the School of Athens painting by Raphael.  Plato points up, to the heavens, while Aristotle points outward, towards the world.

There have been some touchstones in my life that have led me to believe that what my career will end up being.  My suspicion is that I want to make a name for myself studying personalities, biographies, reputation, and identity (both formation and maintenance).

Last year, when I attended the Achievement Summit in Hawai’i, I got to listen to A. Scott Berg speak about his life as a biographer.  He’s written a biography about Charles Lindbergh and is working currently on one for Woodrow Wilson.   I remember being taken by his speech moreso than some others, and I think this quote sums it up well as to why:

“I did tell myself early on: I think it would be interesting, perhaps, to spend a career writing a half-dozen biographies of twentieth-century American cultural figures—each one, as I often use as my metaphor, a different wedge of the great apple pie.”

As a dotcom kid I grew up with extensive biographies swirling around out of Silicon Valley about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (cults of personality if there ever were any), Jeff Bezos, and later Mark Zuckerberg and Evan Williams and Richard Branson, et al.

The intelligence services worldwide of course keep elaborate leadership databases that try to figure people out based on their backgrounds in order to predict true intentions, biases, and future political/military/economic decisions.

When I was in the Army and when I went to Australia, I wrote some very vivid descriptions of the people I met — I enjoyed studying their ticks and appreciating them for their unique qualities.  Perhaps one of the only writers I’ve seen who admires subtle things about personalities is F. Scott Fitzgerald — if you read his books, he writes about people as if their tendencies are timeless and universally understood by all people.  For instance, from “Tender is the Night”:

“The mother’s face was of a fading prettiness that would soon be patted with broken veins; her expression was both tranquil and aware in a pleasant way.  However, one’s eyes moved on quickly to her daughter, who had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold bath in the evening.”

and

“She did not like these people, especially in her immediate comparison of them with those who had interested her at the other end of the beach.  Her mother’s modest but compact social gift got them out of unwelcome situations swiftly and firmly.  But Rosemary had been a celebrity for only six months, and sometimes the French manners of her early adolescence and the democratic manners of America, these latter superimposed, made a certain confusion and let her in for just such things.”

I guess what I’m going for is that biographies have been tools of only the well-educated, to describe the elite (those worth talking about).

What I hope Galapag.us will be is a way to allow anyone to form biographies about themselves and others.  The way I see the world, not only should one treat another as an equal human being, but he should also see every other person as having a unique, interesting story.  After all, no one goes through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and growing old without having interesting stories about how they dealt with certain crises, new experiencies, their first loves, bad break-ups, etc.  Each person is a story.

I would like to get those stories out.  For everyone on Earth.

And maybe become, in that way, the biggest biographer ever. =)

A couple points interest me lately about the social graph.

One:  while it’s old hat now to talk about, I continue to admire the fact that now we are able to keep past friends, acquaintances, and people we’ve met as touchstones by adding them to Facebook.  Life’s relationships hardly seem as ephemeral — I lost touch with a lot of my childhood friends as I left Texas and they stayed within.  But now with Facebook reaching its tendrils into even the older demographics and smaller countries, people I used to spend time with are now becoming visible to me again.  And I will never lose touch with them again as long as we all retain trust in the Facebook system.

How will that affect the way we age, the way we communicate, the way we organize?  Now that we can keep in touch with people from cradle to grave, how will that affect our ability to deal with all of our friends dying or getting sick as they get older?  How will that affect fund-raising when we now can pull favors from our entire life’s social graphs?  If we’re called out for bad behavior, can we use such an extensive social graph to repair our reputations and defend us as good people?

Second point:  what do we do with the people we actively keep out of our Facebook social graphs?  Facebook has finally added the ability to group people so that certain groups can’t see everything about you (i.e. work people can’t see your photos, if you choose to configure it that way).

John Clippinger calls this a negative identity, based on how the immune system works, only exposing itself as much as needed and allowing in anything once it passes basic verification (blood type, usually).

Certainly, many people do not friend their parents.  This is unfortunate but also a coping mechanism.   It might be fixed by Facebook’s new settings.  But there’s that desire to keep one’s parents out of one’s personal life, for individual identity formation.

But what I’m really getting at is what if you meet someone casually, or know someone a long time, and choose to NOT friend them?  That is becoming, now that Facebook is so ubiquitous, quite noticeable to everyone who knows both parties.  Why didn’t he friend me?  It must be because he really has a problem with me.  Now I get messages saying that they don’t want to friend me because they’re trying to limit exposure — they’ll connect with me on LinkedIn, though.  Considering the effort it takes to divide one’s spheres of life like that, it must be a pretty significant psychological issue for people.

Black markets exist because the formal economy does not either recognize the market for those goods as being legal, or because the formal economy is not doing a good enough job providing access to those goods.

How does the negative identity affect a black market for social capital?  Is there a market for those people who are not included in our social graphs?  Does it go beyond social shunning and become a problem in formation of trust and reputation?  If Galapag.us is trying to offer a complete picture of a person in order to formalize a standard for identity and reputation, how does it address the gaps such as distancing oneself from parents and work colleagues, disavowing knowledge of mistresses and affairs, hiding crimes, etc.?

This underground economy of social capital must be expressed in some way to be valuable for accurate reputation calculations.  But how?

I was reading this blog post about what makes Twitter so interesting:

The key to Twitter is that it is phatic – full of social gestures that are like apes grooming each other. Both Google and Twitter have little boxes for you to type into, but on Google you’re looking for information, and expecting a machine response, whereas on Twitter you’re declaring an emotion and expecting a human response.

I think it would be kind of cool on Galapag.us if, since Galapag.us will be more data collection and analysis than networking and interaction, it could tell people what it THINKS you’re doing.  So you might not even be updating your status like you would on Facebook or Twitter, but Galapag.us, when your profile page is viewed, might tell the viewer that “Ben Turner seems to be analyzing the relative importance of hours worked against productivity and happiness,” sort of like how Track Your Happiness does based on the results of your survey answers.

It is interesting to me to think of something like Twitter (which as a developer is FAR more fun to work with than Facebook is) as ambient awareness, or lifestreaming, or, as the blog post intimates, social grooming.  The same way we take facial expressions, body language, intonation, etc. as cues in real life, Twitter sort of lets us do (but not fully) through its platform.

What if we could really bring this out in more meaningful ways than just letting you foul up a web page with dumb wallpapers and icons like myspace did?

[Final note:  I thought the phrase 'tragedy of the comments' was funny, referring to how useless comments on posts usually are, unless curated/rated.]

I would like to see a well-designed infographic that tries to chart out about how long it takes for certain endeavors to become productive, on average.

The initial datapoint, I think, would be the time it takes for a person from a developed nation to reach the point where he/she is creating something genuinely new for society.  My guess would be that it falls somewhere between 30 and 40 years of age.  Calculating the time it takes to finish school, get some experience working, fail a couple times, and perhaps get more schooling (as more and more people are being forced to do now), that would put someone at least around 30 years of age before he is untethered from educational requirements or the trappings of youthful indulgence or overwhelming financial stress.

At that point, he could be expected to formulate his life’s career then, or to at least begin down that path.  Despite the hand-wringing over athletes who are minors, child prodigies, and college dropout entrepreneurs, it seems to me that overall, the really successful people are well into their 30’s that I’m most interested in.  They’ve served their time and are taking more risks.

Other datapoints I’d like to see would be similar to Gladwell’s 10,000 hours:  # of years for education policies to work, # of months for militaries to respond appropriately to new environments, # of generations to forget a culture’s devastating legacy (like 9/11), # of years before basic science investment turns into scientific renaissance, etc.

One of Geni.com’s (a socially collaborative family tree) most compelling features is that you can add relatives to your family tree without their having to do it themselves.  This was a feature that probably came from necessity:  you’re not going to “friend” your great-great-great grandfather who’s been dead for a while.

But the upshot of this is that a few power users (since social networking always follows power laws) are empowered to build out most of the network.  People who aren’t as active in the network can verify their own details and maybe fill in a few other details that they may know.  This is more of a Wikipedia model, where a small number of people do most of the work, but anyone has the opportunity to add or just use what others have done.

I just started using Nike+ and the Gmail import function is broken.  So even though I have like 800 contacts, I can’t check against them to see if anyone else is using Nike+ that I know.  The result is that I only have 1 friend on it right now, another guy I chat with regularly about exercising.  How am I supposed to be more engaged?  How are we supposed to build a community?

So Galapag.us will let people add anyone else’s profile to the system.  I already planned to beta test the site within my Georgetown network, but I can already envision myself adding basic profiles for all my closest friends and then inviting them to claim it for their own.

People will also, I imagine, add profile pages for celebrities.  Celebrities will be somewhat forced to defend themselves by claiming their profile and either parking it or (preferably) building it out.

Another side effect might be that human rights groups could document small communities in war-torn/oppressed countries.  That is, they could keep censuses on small towns and update their info so the world can see if a lot of people are disappearing because of political violence or dying of disease/malnutrition.

While the costs of storage, bandwidth, and processing time are dropping like a rock, the human population in the world is going to be leveling out, and thus there is a finite number of people.  As population stabilizes, individuals will each become more valuable and more will be invested in each person.  In developed nations, families have fewer children because they are not as likely to lose the children to disease or war or anything else — the time and resources spent having more children is then put into giving them better educations and improved health, among other factors.

So Galapag.us will be right in the sweet spot for providing a way to document more and more of the stabilizing population…and then allowing them to create value for themselves through public reputation.  Doesn’t that sound beautiful?

Having finished grad school, I’m now waiting for my job to begin.  In the meantime, I’ve been vacationing and have been able to hunker down and code a bit for Galapag.us.  I’ve been working on some rudimentary versions of Facebook’s event updaters and news feed, as well as working on the internal mechanics of building formulas and sharing them with others.  So far it’s been going pretty well, given that I’m not much of a coder.

And as I tinker with the overall structure more, I’ve been coming up with lots of lofty ideas for how I want Galapag.us to ultimately look like.

For example, I would love to extend the Galapagos Islands theme and have different islands for the Galapag.users to play on, in some capacity.  There would be a welcoming island where people have to gather enough social capital and contribute back enough such that they can level up and use the full site.  There would be an island for the role-playing game that I intend to build using each person’s unique profile data.  I haven’t thought about how the islands will work exactly, but I want to layer tribes onto that as well.  One problem/benefit is that people have multiple tribes now, not isolated by geography alone.  Can you tie multiple facets of identity to a geographic location in any meaningful way besides having something as hollow as Facebook groups?

This whole way of thinking about islands allows me to build a sort of cultural map of the islands and layer on different aspects of human and social capital.  I’d love to build atmospherics into the islands such that islands have different weather patterns affected by how many people are using a particular part of the site (congestion, increased heat, dynamism) or how prominent the information on that island has become.  I’m not sure how rainy tropical seasons or perfect beach days could be converted from overall site statistics, but it’s a concept I want to explore in order to make the site a breathing entity.

A couple other ideas I had were to view the site as an ecosystem, and employ the Galapag.users to try to maintain the balance of all the different factors on the island, through incentives.  Was there a typhoon in Indonesia?  Perhaps the charity part of the site would offer more incentives when there are calls for Galapag.user action.  Are the long-time users unhappy with new features?  More attention would go there.  There would be hotspots and coldspots on the islands to direct peoples’ attention.  Obviously there would be multiple constituents and lots of issues, but my approach is to use a collaborative method in which users can help maintain the balance.  I’d like to build in Liz Coleman’s liberal arts education program, focusing students on actionable problems and not just fields of interest.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about is how to gather more data without people having to manually enter it.  A lot of the problem could be mitigated by taking on companies and organizations to enter in aggregate data.  Why should you have to enter what groceries or fast food meals you bought when those companies can do it quickly and easily not just for you but for everyone? (given a good registration system)  What if the government was sharing information about you to the database for its health services, social security, etc.?  Already I am working on allowing people to enter in info about you so they can help you complete your profile (with you having the final say in approving/declining that info, of course).

There are big issues, such as privacy concerns and getting organizations to share data.  These solutions are sort of pie-in-the-sky but perhaps in the future, our deathgrips on any shred of info we possess will become looser.  Perhaps we’ll be willing to share our info in order to benefit from the data that companies already enjoy about us.  Perhaps it will allow us to engage with companies and organizations better, if we can use universal logins and social data across sites.

Yahoo! has some wonderful documentation on building social capital and incentives into social networks.  I’ve thought about how to properly align incentives for users (in the way of points and achievement bonuses) with Galapag.us’s goals.  One thing I hate about most social networking projects is that they award people who spend 24 hours a day playing or people who just collect other friends or objects without any meaning behind them.  So the goal is not necessarily to reward those who have more time to play, but who can build more meaningful and important connections — true social capital.

I would like to reward notable figures on Galapag.us, like Nobel Prize winners…while at the same time building new metrics and fame for genuine networkers and builders of social capital.  Different people find different ways to be successful and any social networking site/human data platform should represent that.

So I’m thinking big here, which can be frustrating because the whole mentality for start-ups now is to do something really simple.  Everyone pushes you to refine an idea down to an essence — but that goes against the complex, generalist, all-encompassing nature of Galapag.us.  Everyone’s in search of the next Twitter, a simple platform for messaging asymmetrically.  But who’s going to bring all this data together?

I’ve been thinking about the actual mechanics underneath a system of limitless personal data inputs.  What relevance do different data fields in your life have with each other?  Take, for instance, the number of hours you’ve spent playing a guitar, and then comparing that against the number of women you’ve dated.  What is the common factor?  Would there ever be any correlation between the two?  Perhaps women like a man who can play a guitar, so therefore you might want to play a guitar in order to get more chicks.  Or perhaps there’s something about the culture of playing a guitar (i.e. being in small groups of friends) that facilitates emotional relationships.

These are interesting (but perhaps statistically untestable) hypotheses that I am more than happy to let Galapag.users play with, experiment upon, and debate with each other about.  While I am interested in providing the tools to let Galapag.users interpret their own data however they want, I also know there must be a ubiquitous economic formula or standardized measure within each of the formulae that Galapag.users will create.

It will include some function of attention and time.  That is, peoples’ attention given towards a certain activity, or towards tracking that activity online (a statistical bias in itself, perhaps), is paramount towards determining what value someone places upon an activity or a subject, but it is not the ONLY measure.  Time perhaps is a more neutral unit of measure.  Despite our very different lives, varying deeply not only from person to person but also from tribe to tribe and country to country , we are all dealt with a hard-coded limit of 24 hours in the day.

A large part of that day is spent sleeping (we cannot track quality of sleep yet, but I’d love to have the ability to), but unlimited permutations of how other activities are mixed into the rest of the day reflect our individual uniqueness and personal interests.  As an example, the average hours of sleep per night in the US seems to be about 6-7 hours, while it is recommended that they get 7-8.  Some people may sleep on average more, around 9-10, while others who have a lot of work to do may get as little as 5-6.  Coders certainly may go on long stints without any sleep at all if they’re in the middle of the coding zone on something they’re engaged in.

But you can extract some fairly accurate time-value pictures of people based on how they compose the activities in their days relative to how long that activity takes.  So therefore if you spend 5 hours a day in the gym and working out, probably because you are an athlete, it goes to say that you exceed the average and value that aspect of your life quite a bit.  It’s also likely that you spend a lot of time also on your eating habits and diet.  But not necessarily.  It could be a symptom of some self-image problem.  Or maybe it’s a short-term program, not indicative of your life-long patterns.  It might be that you spend much of your day doing the wrong thing for you (addiction, bad job, family problems), so in that case your numbers will not represent themselves the same way they would for someone else who doesn’t have those issues.  It might be that the summation of activities you do in a day exceeds 24 hours, because you’re capable of multi-tasking.

Thus this gets complex quickly.  But expecting the amount of time you take versus the average, per day, on certain activities is a rough way to gauge the value you place on those things.  Time, not just over a day, but over years and paying specific attention to how different key events (marriage, divorce, children being born, graduations) affect your patterns would become even more fascinating.

Attention and time belong in a function together.  You might be fully engaged into a hobby, relative to others, but it might be that that doesn’t really eat up a lot of your time.  This would be akin to Malcolm Gladwell’s positing that his 10,000 hours need to be active, fully-focused practice and not just 10,000 hours of hanging out at the tennis court chatting while playing a little bit.

These two data points (attention being harder to quantify) will provide the grounding for the rest of the data within Galapag.us formulae.

I think ultimately that these time-value formulae are akin to productivity calculations, which seem interesting when compared across nations.  Western Europe seems to take a lot of vacation time, while Americans take little at all.  Relatively speaking (compared to, perhaps, GDP/capita), who is more productive?  While we can look at our own personal productivities relative to each other, what will it look like when we compare across nations using the Galapag.us dataset?  Can we tug out interesting observations about the value of time and attention?  Can we employ such data towards strategies for increasing human capital and youth development in developing nations?

Do you have any ideas about how to proceed with these measures of value?

Seems like everywhere I look, enforcing transparency is the theme and is being touted as the possible solution to today’s problems.

Massive financial crisis?  See Daniel Roth’s Wired article for a plan for radical transparency in the financial markets.  See Toby Segaran and Jesper Andersen of freerisk.org talk about transparent asset rating schemes and database schema.  Or read Umair Haque’s call for Finance 2.0.

Political corruption?  See Transparency International or use Global Integrity’s corruption assessments.  Or see what tools the Sunlight Foundation is working on.

Our detachment from food production systems?  Read Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma in which he proposes slaughterhouses transparent to the world instead of the immensely secretive systems in place now.

I love it.  It seems like ages since David Brin wrote his book, “The Transparent Society:  Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?”, which I consider to be one of the most under-rated books out there but which deserves to be cited as often as, say, Hernando de Soto’s “The Mystery of Capital:  Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else”.

Brin proposes a world of total transparency, where we give up much of our “privacy” (to exclude within our homes) in public, in exchange for the ability to watch the watchmen, police, government, other organizations, and each other.

Sunlight, it is often quoted, is the best disinfectant.  I agree.  The hand-wringing over Facebook’s privacy controls is necessary, but in the sense that we need to have control over our own data and reputations, but not necessary in that we are moving towards a world of publicly visible reputations.

Secrecy — that is, darkness, and being able to hide what you do to different people — allows for corruption, duplicity, and deceit.  It breaks down trust.  It leads to massive Ponzi schemes if combined with favorable regulatory environments (one of the genius outcomes of a radical free-market ideology to allow organizations to bilk people out of all their money).  It leads to realpolitik and cutthroat realism.  It discourages education (the less you know, the more I can exploit you) and human rights (you may know, but you can’t do anything about it).

Transparency has basically become what I’ve become infatuated with, along with reputation and identity.  The research model behind my work for the Yahoo!/ISD fellowship looks at privacy and openness and finds what could happen through the intersection of both:  transparency.  My model is below:

I get really excited about this stuff.  This is the way we have to go in so many areas — towards transparency and accountability — if we hope to achieve sustainable progress.  And this goes for us, in our own lives, in our own countries, before we even hope to press other “evil” or “secretive” or “authoritarian” countries to open up to the rest of the world and be more democratic.

So if you have any more examples of transparency projects in other sectors (like in education or in voting machines, et al), or projects I could get involved with in that area, please let me know.

As you know, I’m hoping to build a massive, transparent reputation system where people will be able to affect other peoples’ reputations, which they must defend and can respond to, creating feedback mechanisms…all out in the open.  People I’ve bounced this idea off of for Galapag.us usually respond with disgust that they don’t want to have their privacy violated.  But consider the alternatives.  When you can use a reputation to build capital and prove yourself, and not just be afraid of people knowing things about you, wouldn’t those benefits outweigh the drawbacks?  What about all those people you know who get over, and get away with screwing other people over?  What about them?  How do we hold ourselves accountable?

How can I convince you that Galapag.us will be huge?