The O’Reilly Webcast: Youth & Creativity, hosted by Julie Baher and Bill Westerman, presented an insightful picture of youths’ social media activity beyond Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace.  Interestingly, Baher and Westerman found that the latter platforms were in fact not often used by “creative publishing” teens to express themselves.  Rather, those teens were using more niche sites like planet renders and imeem that enabled them to “have something to say, or sense of self around their topic of choice.”

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Every single day people, arguable most, blindly accept companies’ TOS (“terms of service”).  They unresistingly click “I Agree” to whatever legal jargon is in between them and their desired product or service.  Why?  People trust the companies have their best interest in mind.  They trust, for example, that the photos they post to Facebook are not thrown up on a billboard on I-5, or a silly comment they made on a friend’s wall will live on for eternity.

It comes down to people believing Mark Zuckerberg when he says, “We wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want.  The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work.”

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INTRODUCTION

With the proliferation of social networking sites, we are increasingly reliant on our online profiles to accurately present our personalities. But do they? Dr. Scott Counts of Microsoft Research’s VIBE Group explored just how people’s perceptions are impacted by the advent of online identities.

In a recent presentation of findings, Dr. Counts discussed studies that delved into the ways we self-present our personalities via online profiles and how others perceive those presentations.  The results were interesting, and proved the promising reliability and accuracy of the newfound ability to “right-click” on someone via their online profiles.

Below are the insight summaries from two of the Mircrosoft studies that focused on how people perceive personalities via online profiles.
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