What's After Facebook, Part 1: 6d and Hibe

6d

6d, the brainchild of Erik Bigelow, bills itself as an identity-building application. I think that already is a very clever move. I don't know how far they've thought it out at this point, but calling it an applicaiton hints at smartphone/tablet integration as well as browser plugin. 


Regardless of mobile-related plans, 6d's goal is to let people who want total control of their content - photos, thoughts, etc, - build their online identity. The person / persona can then chose to share with whomever they want in whatever fashion they want. Or they can just keep everything organized and not share at all. 


They seem to think in terms of a person having one online identity, establishing it, and cultivating it with the app. The driving force behind that view is something I certainly sympathize with; if you are using a free service such as Facebook to 'be online', you're actually the product. Facebook uses whatever you contribute, be it a pic, a link, a like, a friend list, a list of favorite movies, etc, to make money for itself. If you didn't give it "you" it would not have anything to do. In exchange it makes it relatively simple for you to access your friends.


But as I've discussed in previous posts, Facebook can't make any money unless they find more ways to use you. To make a crude analogy, Facebook wants to be as efficient and profitable with you as hog farmers are with their pigs ("you can use every part of a pig except the squeal" is the old saying).  But hey, the hogs get a constant food supply, room to roam around, and a cozy place to sleep so its a pretty good deal. It sure beats foraging!


If you don't feel real good about that, you should ask yourself why you're doing it.If you want total control of your "personal brand" or online identity and the ability to grow it over time, perhaps you should look to 6d for an alternative.

Hibe 

As excited as I am about 6d, I'm even more thrilled with the idea of Hibe. The reason being it explicitly goes beyond the idea of sharing or even curating one identity and begins with the idea that in fact your identity is made up of numerous smaller contexts.

Hibe is the innovation of Jean Dobey and bills itself as a way to social network that is true to real life. Their view is that while we are each one person, every person has multiple contexts to their life and they rarely share many contexts with the same people. You emphasize certain parts of your self and interests walking down the street, others at work, at school, and still others with close friends and with family.

You can choose to share the same things with all those groups, but you certainly aren't forced to default to that level of sharing. Their point is that the fact that Facebook does force that on you means you can't really be yourself with anyone. 

So their work gears around fine tuning a way for you to create your online presence while still managing different parts of yourself. To do this you create multiple 'contexts' that you can group people and pics and ideas around, and manage them that way rather than Facebook's way which makes it nearly impossible to keep everyone you know from seeing it all.

I've already signed myself up for an account on this platform and in the next 2-3 weeks I'll definitely update here often regarding my thoughts on whether it is user friendly, labor intensive, etc and most of all, whether it works. But from the outside looking in, this seems extremely promising. Be sure to check out their video on their website.

Later this week we'll take a look at Incliq and Secret Social.