Over 60 years ago, this effect was first verified in an experiment by psychologist Bertram Forer with some students. He constructed a personality assessment from various horoscopes, and gave the same assessment individually to every student who took a personality test.

The assessment included sentences such as:

At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved.

Almost anyone can find some truth about themselves in sentences like that.  And, in repeated experiments that tendency held true.  And with social media and other online (or offline) interactions, there is perhaps the same tendency to follow the Forer effect.

If a social media tool analyzes our online traits and provides us with a judgement, we probably will think it must have truth in it.  After all, it’s about us, based on our own input.

Even knowing that an interaction is non-human, such as interacting with a “bot” of some sort (or a voice response system), we still feel that the interaction is ours alone.  But perhaps like a credit score run amok with other people’s information, we should not accept the assessment without making sure it’s not co-mingling our information with others.

To some extent, what you believe becomes your reality, and certainly our belief can get us past otherwise-overwhelming challenges.

If a new tool tells you that you are #1,230 of all tweeters worldwide (on Twitter), you are inclined to want to believe it. But what if it were partly a randomly-generated number?

hmmm….

And in a perhaps orthogonal way, an online persona is our own Forer effect upon the world, and this can be bolstered using social networks.  It’s the same old technique put online: if enough people refer about someone as a visionary, then it is easier to believe to be true about that person.  And we can get others to say those nice things about us! (article continues below)

Sites such as Facebook & LinkedIn, along newer sites such as Philtro, are also trying to enhance their picture of who you are via your social network, in order to provide you with more relevant information (and, of course, advertisements).

While this social network assessment technology is still new, over time we are likely to expect our online services to deliver us what we like, without us having to do much to filter those information & media feeds.  Just say (one day) to your phone/PDA – “I want to watch a minute of the most interesting clips of my friend’s party last night, and after that chill out for about 30 minutes to some new music like what I heard there.  Go!” and you just might get what you instructed.

And you may believe it’s been done just for you.

The reasons behind being what could be called “semi-social” are varied, and include:

• Desire to be different
• Fear of (using) technology
• Not enough desire to socialize online
• Not enough time to socialize online – information overload
• Most friends or relatives not using online social websites
• Desire to cut back on online social activities

So, your choices on how to handle these miscreants – um, miscellaneous users – include:

• Acknowledge them – Show that you know that not everyone “gets” it and tone down the geeky/chic-y plug-ins and social media campaigns
• Help them – Provide work-arounds so that semi-socials can partake of your website’s offerings
• Ignore them – Don’t slow down the speed at which you use every possible social media tool to expand your reach, while risking alienating people who are semi-social.
• Invite them to socialize – Take a chance that you may find their moment to start socializing via one of your preferred methods. (This invitation can happen along with the first bullet point above – after acknowledging them.)

We’re all semi-social and even non-social during the course of a given day. So, it is easy to understand the mindset of someone who is routinely less social online. That is, if you can stop posting for a moment and ponder about them.

Times Square, New York City (2009), slightly altered. © 2009 ChiefSocialOfficer.com

Reportedly, many places block Facebook, including entire countries, and MySpace is blocked by many of these same places… plus hordes of well-meaning parents. There are perhaps just as many proposed workarounds for users to bypass the blocks. But for the world wide social web to work out, including monetization aspects, it will have to work in enough places to be considered ubiquitous. Adsense is pervasive today, and is not generally blocked in the way that social networks are. This situation is probably due to it’s origins, function, and the fact that it is not seen as linked to some of the issues such as malware and productivity loss that cause social networking sites to be blocked.

The evolving integration of the social web puts choices into the hands of website owners trying to see the ROI (return on investment) of adopting and adapting the technologies to their websites. The technology is not yet available to the public, and competes in various ways with OpenSocial, OpenID, MyBlogLog, and other services as the effort to evolve identity management on the web continues. If one’s website audience primarily accesses the site at work locations that might block social networking sites, form a social network integration strategy and implementation plan that accounts for these hurdles.

How will webmasters decide what works for them?

The effort to implement “social connector” technology on a website, plus the possibly-problematic ability of these technologies to to integrate with each other, may have the war of the social web won based on webmaster adoption. What platform will bring them the most reward (users, money, attention, etc.)? The ROI of time and money, plus compatibility, becomes important.

The first major text-ad service, Goto.com (which became Overture and was bought by Yahoo!), has given up it’s first place market position to Adsense. Being huge, successful, and in first place (and then getting bought) does not mean ultimately winning the war. The battles now in the social platform space include fighting to be the preferred (or only) identity-holder for people when they are online across the entire social web. The “first place” position of social networking sites & services is in flux this year. And the ability of each site to monetize it’s social base, and thus survive, may rely on sharing their success with thousands of website operators.

The near-term winners will likely be those that have a compelling ROI for website and social application owners, enough to get them to make the effort to write for a particular social platform. Facebook Connect seems to have this ROI coming out of the gate.

The popularity of social networks varies by country. The adoption of social networks within and by website owners may follow similar patterns. And, like sports popularity varying by area, with baseball, soccer, football, basketball, cricket, and others all competing for similar passion & purchases from fans, it may simply be a multi-player game with multiple fields.

Photo (c) 2008 Chief Social Officer

Stripping away the more mystical aspects, one could assume that the current path of technology is to create an actual akashic record of all events of our world – everything that can be recorded. Road traffic, transactions, conversations, and with microblogging all the rage… apparently every thought (as in, tweets on Twitter.com and updates on sites such as facebook.com and myspace.com).

What about recording thoughts from within the brain? Possible, as EEG (electroencephalography) and MEG have shown. And this development will continue to develop, as who would not want to control a computer – and thus other mechanical devices – with their brains, as shown in the video below about the Neurosky controller:

Assuming technology will evolve and refine thought-reading further, then it also will allow thought-recording. Initially it would be a stream of simple commands such as “move mouse up”.

But how about the future? Less than 40 years ago the large computers that filled an entire room contained less information than fits on a CD or on a memory card for a camera or mobile phone. Today’s personal computers are 100 times smaller, and 1000 times cheaper, and run laps around their ancestors in terms of speed & performance.

So by one stretch – and it is a stretch – the crude EEG game controllers of today will evolve in 20 or 30 years to devices that will read and extract our ideas and concepts. And there will be storage media to record this brain activity, and likely also record a 3-D representation of real events, continuously. These events would include human activity, and nature, weather, etc. While we may not be able to capture past events or the thoughts of someone like Shakespeare as he was writing, we have already started capturing this arguably permanent record of human consciousness.

Going back to the definition of akashic, it contains: “…adherents describe the existence of various akashic records (e.g., human, animal, plant, mineral, etc.) that in their summation encompass all possible knowledge.” There is a counter-balance in that “the akashic records have been rejected by the scientific community, due to a lack of any independently verifiable evidence.”

Evidence lacking, that is, until the scientific community creates it. Or, actually, as we all create it.