David Emery Online

Private Internet

1 November 2006

There’s a growing trend in these parts. You can’t see it, but it happening never the less. There’s a whole new swarth of web sites that have rich and compelling content that you haven’t seen.

You think you’re fairly on top of the latest goings on on the internet? You still haven’t seen any of this stuff.

What am I talking about?

The private internet.

If you haven’t yet, please go and check out Vox – Six Apart’s – the maker of TypePad and LiveJounal – new product. No really; have a look – it’s quite good. I’ll wait.

Done? Good.

One of the key features of Vox is easily being able to limit posts, pictures and other content to be only viewable by your friends and family. Obviously it’s not the first site to do this – Flickr has done the same for ages – but it’s an indicator of a shift towards a more segregated and “closed” internet (but not necessarily in a bad way). This also ties in nicely with the popularity of MySpace and others like it, which really revolve around communication between you and your peers.

The appearance of the private internet – a network of sites that only certain people can access – is a direct result of the mass popularisation of blogs and the internet. Early blog pioneers had – and continue to have – no problem with wanting everybody and anybody to be able to read what they written and see their pictures. This general viewpoint is also shared by the younger teenage group of online users, as they’ve grown up with the concept of little privacy, and hence have no problems with posting their lives online for all to see.

However, now that sites such as Vox and MySpace are beginning to reach a mass market audience, they’re also hitting an audience that really doesn’t want everybody and anybody to see what they post online. They’ve grown up with a much stronger sense of personal privacy, and have far too many issues with posting stuff that anybody can see (“What if my boss sees it?!?” etc). They do now, though, see a lot of value in posting photos, videos and personal updates online – as long as they can control who sees them.

It’ll be very interesting to see whether this trend continues – I suspect it will – and what effect it will have on the internet in general – will we see less blogs as more become private? Will sites such as Flickr start to loose their appeal as more and more of the photos become locked off? Or will everything we have at the moment stay roughly the same, as all the new private sites are in addition to the current ones, not instead of?