What Designers Can Learn From Facebook's Beacon

The blogosphere (and even the regular old newspaper-sphere) is alight with stories of Facebook's online advertising flop, Beacon.

What can designers learn from this flop? It's not about privacy; it's about the presentation of self.

People have different "selves" for different places - virtual or otherwise - and designs must be consistent with these variety of selves.

Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow posted an interesting story on InformationWeek that predicted the decline of Facebook because of its own success.

He predicts that the more people that are one Facebook, the more confusing it is.

Your "creepy coworkers," your boss, and your friends you met at Burning Man are all in the same "place," making it confusing, embarrassing and difficult for everyone.

What Doctorow is really describing is sociologist Erving Goffman's notion of "the front." Using the theatre as a metaphor Goffman argued that we actually "perform" multiple selves.

Each place we go has a "front" that we learn to incorporate.

A front has a wardrobe, a setting, a decor, make-up, a script and stage direction.

We have a "front stage self" that we perform for everyone to see, a "back stage self" for only our closest intimates to see, and a "core self," which is deeply private.