3pointD.com

An interesting Trackback showed up on 3pointD.com this evening, from a reader called babysista_13, who wondered, “How can I get my identity off myspace.com?” Turns out babysista_13 isn’t a reader at all, just a panicked MySpace member who couldn’t figure out how to leave the MySpace service, and had posted a query over at Help.com. Following the link reminded me of something I think many of us don’t consider often enough: that there are even seemingly insignificant things about the interface design of sites like MySpace and Help.com that can have a real social impact on the people who use them.

These days, Help.com, as its About page doesn’t do a very good job of explaining, sets new users up with their own Help.com-administered WordPress blog, lets them post their queries there, then searches for blog posts on similar topics. Because my Being Cheri Horton post was tagged “identity,” among other things, Help.com whipped up a Trackback ping and sent it along on behalf of babybsista_13.

It’s an interesting way to connect people, though I’m bothered that you have to sign up to the service and write a post before Help.com tells you that it’s actually pinging other bloggers. And in this case, it’s slightly coincidental that I was able to point babysista_13 to a solution, given that the post Help.com referred her to didn’t have anything to do with MySpace. The other posts it pinged don’t seem to have much to do with the service either:

What philosophies of personal identity are out there?
How to talk about money with my spouse.
The Conservation of Individual Conscience
MSN Messenger Problems
Buying fake licenses from the DMV
New Digital ID World Blog

The other thing that bothered me about getting that ping was that my post — or the post I was linking to, anyway — isn’t quite safe for work. If babysista_13 is actually 13 years old, as it seems she may be, then Help.com isn’t doing quite the filtering job it should be.

No groundbreaking conclusions to be drawn here, other than the fact that the tools are still crude. But it’s important to note that there are social implications to the state of the technology. In this case, a site that’s intended to be helpful sent someone who’s probably 13 to a link they probably should have been kept from. The whole thing put me in mind of an interesting conversation I had last night about how technologies like MySpace may be shaping our social interactions:

A woman of about 35 was telling me about her MySpace experience. She had populated her Top 8 list with other friends who were on MySpace. But the friend she’d put in the #2 slot was offended that she didn’t get top billing. (Top billing went to the woman’s husband!) Again, the technology is shaping the social interaction: because that favorites list forces you to place people into discrete, ranked slots, you probably can’t avoid snubbing someone. MySpace could have prevented this — randomizing the order of the Top 8 list each time it loads is only one of many possible solutions — but they didn’t. This isn’t a failing, but it was a choice, and it’s a pretty good illustration of the social impact such technological choices can have.