More than 10 years ago when I was dating, I made it a habit to always Google my date ahead of our first meeting in person. Given what I was doing on an everyday basis at work it just felt natural to try to get a bit of insight beforehand and satisfy part of my curiosity.
It was fun.
Until they started doing the same with me.
Then all of a sudden I learned what it actually means to be visible online and to never have shied away from putting your ideas and comments out there in this vast digital space.
Because there were a ton of things you could find out back then with very little effort. And there’s exponentially more today.
Which to some extend makes it such an intriguing opportunity to organize.
I was reminded about this when I encountered SpoonBill; a service that allows you to get insights on the updates, your Twitter contacts have been making to fx their bio over the years.
Digging into those is a fascinating thing, and if you allow yourself a bit of time to do it, it is actually quite revealing about peoples personalities.
Some may call this snooping, and to some extend it is. But it’s still information people have put out there themselves. Actively. It is there own words. How they like to see themselves at any given moment in time. It is not something that is collected behind the scenes.
The ability to get an overview of how people change their self-image or perhaps even identity over time is a perfect complement to the long-seen practice of trying to perfect the image, you convey using various social media platforms.
And Twitter is a great tool to start the forensic analysis with given that it is a platform where professional and personal interests collide in one big hodge-podge of things.
For that reason I also think that SpoonBill is at the aventgarde of a plethora of tools and services, we’re going to see going forward that tried to address the same issue; getting a sense of who people really are behind the smoke and mirrors of SoMe and personal branding.
Getting behind the scenes and to the core of people is a fundamental human need on which all kinds of trust and enduring relationships are built.
Thus, my best guess is that getting this right is going to be a huge business opportunity for those, who want to engage.
(Photo: Pixabay.com)