That's a very important point, IMHO, and an underrated one.
The next big social network -- the one that turns Facebook into MySpace 2.0 -- will be one that lets users maintain not just multiple 'circles' but multiple identities. I don't just want to separate what my parents see from what my coworkers see, or separate what my (hypothetical) friends from church see from what my (hypothetical) fellow members at the local underground S&M club see. I want to be different people as far as they're all concerned.
This will scale in interesting ways. For one thing, advertisers will actively benefit from this model because it will let them target individual personae.
The notion of keeping the name you were born with and using it forever, everywhere, is the original "single sign-on" paradigm. To the extent single sign-on, single identity is suboptimal in cyberspace, it will eventually be seen as such in real life. The use of real names online already ranges from a useless practice to a hazardous one, depending on how common or how obscure your name is.
I kinda doubt that. It's not in those networks best interests. They need as complete a picture of _you_ as possible to sell you shit.
You can have semi-multiple identities based on the pages you manage/control, but most sites don't want to make it easy to switch accounts because it could lead to ambiguity to their data.
For example, to use multiple accounts on Reddit, you need either The Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) plugin or some type of cookie isolator like container tabs in Firefox or multiple browsers. I think you need to do something similar for Twitter (or use a desktop client).
Federated Social networks that use either ActivityPub or OStatus (like Mastodon, Pleroma and GNUSocial) are interesting because you can have independent accounts on multiple instances, and be logged into all of them without browser tricks (since they're all on different domains).
The next big social network -- the one that turns Facebook into MySpace 2.0 -- will be one that lets users maintain not just multiple 'circles' but multiple identities. I don't just want to separate what my parents see from what my coworkers see, or separate what my (hypothetical) friends from church see from what my (hypothetical) fellow members at the local underground S&M club see. I want to be different people as far as they're all concerned.
This will scale in interesting ways. For one thing, advertisers will actively benefit from this model because it will let them target individual personae.
The notion of keeping the name you were born with and using it forever, everywhere, is the original "single sign-on" paradigm. To the extent single sign-on, single identity is suboptimal in cyberspace, it will eventually be seen as such in real life. The use of real names online already ranges from a useless practice to a hazardous one, depending on how common or how obscure your name is.