I recently signed up for Google Profiles, a fairly mundane service that arrived surprisingly late. Many people search for themselves on Google out of personal curiosity and professional concern. Google has finally introduced a service designed to direct person-based searches to the people in question. On its own this service fills a small but significant gap in search. Many profiles on facebook, myspace, linkedin, and other social networks are protected from search, rendering the majority of social profiles inaccessible from google.

Most of the decisions to protect profiles with robots.txt files were made on the basis of privacy concerns. No one wants future employers viewing photographs of an applicant drunk, or leaving someone liable for comments friends posted on a news feed. While these are legitimate concerns, the lack of accessibility from major search engines doesn't come close to truly protecting personal data on social networks. Each of the sites have different rules regarding privacy, both inside the network and out. Many have customizable settings to control which contacts and networks can view different sets of information. Control over one's personal information is absolutely necessary, but the multitude of different perspectives on what should be available to whom can only lead to confusion.

'Privacy' may not even be the right word to describe how these issues are shaped, and perhaps as the struggle continues to resolve some of these issues a new vocabulary will emerge. In the mean time, a new hierarchy of information has appeared. At SXSW this year, two panels I attended struck me as being incredibly important to this set of issues. The one that focused on privacy can be heard here. Judith Donath of the MIT Media Laboratory stresses the need for a kind of 'digital mirror' that would allow users to view the entire data trail they have left online over the years. She believes the ability to view and amend this data would give control over online identity back to users, and allow a new level of dialogue with corporate partners. Information is a commodity, and little is more valuable than personal preferences, spending histories, and other market-pertinent data.

Once upon a time, television ad executives targeted individual program audiences, inventing the modern science of demographic research in the process. This allowed corporate sponsors to advertise products to only those groups they believed would be interested in purchasing their products. We are now offered the opportunity to move beyond aggregate spending habits and demographic groups into real personal data. Content is now delivered directly to individual consumers. Services like Hulu, Google, iTunes, and Amazon have the ability to target individual users with a precision previously unavailable to television advertisers. Cookies, user accounts, api integration, and mandatory registration all allow individuals to be viewed for who they are, rather than their representative census groups.

Fuzzy groups will begin to take precedence over age, gender, and regionally delimited categories. Rather than being bound by the binary, member or non-member, users will form swarms of belonging and behavior. Individuals can be expressed as degrees of shared behavior, 0.8 not 1 or 0. The increase in precision is linked directly to a proportionate rise in the monetized value of such data. Individuals who work to craft and manicure such online data, sharing more of themselves, but only what they wish to share, may offer this profile to service providers in exchange for a range of opportunities not previously available. Hulu, but with all the content from all providers, with fewer ads, and only ones you wanted to see in the first place.

The greatest obstacle to this sort of distribution has been the difference between ad values in over the air broadcasts and those in direct digital access. Those days are over. The first major tool, albeit one that is particularly unsophisticated, has arrived. It may be a serious battle to maintain control of our own identities, and the Terms of Service will need to be carefully monitored, but we're within sight of a solution. This is obviously an issue that will require a great deal of input from all the involved parties, but it potentially provides a solution to most of the problems we've encountered in digital content management, increasingly expensive and ineffective ads, and user privacy.

Our CrowdSpring project finished up yesterday, with mixed results. I'm happy with the design we got, but feel like the process could have been better. We were very clear that we wanted airplane safety card-style line art as the design standard throughout the submissions. Maybe two of the 53 responses matched that criterion. The rest mainly looked very nice if you wanted a new logo for a bank, real estate company, or other super corporate firm. There seem to be two schools of thoughts among crowd source designers: OS X application icons and bank logos. If you want one or the other, I think you'd get a great selection of fabulous results.

I'm willing to take responsibility for the specs maybe being not super clear on what we sold, which might be how we got all the guys in approach suits and welding masks. We were clear that we didn't want to convey the image of danger. Enter the lightning bolts, flames, and explosion-based logos. "Green is for safety" welcome to condiment row. Yellow and red were clearly the colors of the day.We also offered the lowest possible reward, which may have meant some people were choosier about who they made submissions for. I left star feedback for most work and comments for people who were even close to the ballpark. It was a difficult project and I don't fault anyone for missing the mark, just for not reading the specifications.

I worry about a potential trap here: the more money offered, the more and perhaps better submissions, but the more wasted if Creatives don't read or understand the brief. I'm anxious about the idea of a $1000 layout project or commissioning icons if I can't expect work to match the specification. In our case, we got a great result, but I would have liked to have been able to chose among 4 or 5 similar results at least. I'm not sure what the point of having 53 entries is if only one designer has followed the specifications layed out.

In the past few weeks, I've spent a lot of time with web tools that would proudly identify as 'scaleable' in a number of senses. Mostly, they're very web 2.0, built for web-literate designers and amateur programmers with some sense of code, but not fluency. Almost all of them integrate a markup syntax known as Textile. I'm writing this entry in a server hosted program called Moveable Type, which I've been using in some form or another since it's early days. It's a great blogging platform that handles all the complex back-end structural stuff, letting the user focus on design and content. The problem with this and others like it (Shopify, et al.) is the wide range of user abilities and skills. To start using Moveable Type you need to set up a mySQL database, FTP a bunch of files, and mess around with some CGI. You never see any of that again once it's running unless you really go looking for it. But if you're a designer or web-developer, there's plenty of room to grow and make your own layouts, widgets, or anything else you can think of. The result is three layers of control, each of which needs to scale and flow into each other seamlessly.

For example, I could install the software for someone else who has never opened an FTP client in their life, but if they knew how to use the internet even a little bit they could easily write entries and manage most aspects of their blog, even changing the appearance with templates. Another user might barely be able to install the databases, but have a lot of experience in layout and design. With a little HTML and a lot of CSS you're well on your way to a site that visually has little in common with an out of the box MT blog. I'm still toying with some aspects of this site's visual appearance, and will be for some time. Finally, enter the ninjas. Some people really enjoy writing real code, not just HTML structure , but scripts, applets, widgets, and whole programs, like this:

Thing is, that's about 80 lines of code, plus a source code file. Had I placed that code in a normal entry box, you would have seen the code on the main page, and no pretty mathematics visualization. Textile is the engine syntax that lets me edit in largely plain text with a few markup options for paragraph breaks, text formatting, etc, but more importantly a tag that identifies where textile should be inactive and let me insert code directly. Defining behaviors within a language seems less important than identifying where to ignore the language. Put another way, doors and windows are more important than couches and carpet. To work within a system, one needs to know where and how the exits work.

Processing, the application used to build the visualization applet is another great example of this issue. There are plenty of great ways to build interactive web interfaces btu most cater to programmers, not designers. This has obvious drawbacks. While it may mean fewer memory leaks and less work for the authors of the language, it reduces access to the tools. Processing was built as the simplest possible language and compiler for designers. I first came across it when looking at this fantastic visualization. It's a great example of what you can build from a design standpoint without worrying about all the code, just the parts that matter. Rapid prototyping FTW.

It seems to me one of the biggest challenges facing web developers focusing on user generated content engines today is catering to all three groups. Users with a capital 'U', Designers, and self-identified ninjas all need to be able to work seamlessly and without outside interference. All have different needs. Some will never leave the room, and others want to build a giant garden outside. As you're working with API's or developing them, keep these issues in mind. It's tempting to give preference to the designer category because all they need is custom CSS, but some people need somewhere simpler to start, while others want increased functionality with outside components. It's these latter two groups who will always define the future of your platform or leave you for your competitors out of frustration.