Scola's got a new post feature story up on the Personal Democracy Forum concerning Facebook's decision today to open up the network to all comers. (After midnight, I refer to myself in the third person.) Here's a snippet:

What Facebook did today is to open up the system so that anyone with any old email address at all can join, create a profile, "poke" other users (an innocuous term today that the college kids I know don't seem to find funny), and the like. Identity is only proven on the basis of email address ownership -- meaning that all I have to do to join up is to enter in nancyscolarules@gmail.com and then respond back to an email sent to that address. This process, Facebook says, guarantees that profiles are created only by "a real person."

A real person, maybe, but of course not necessarily the real person that I'm going to represent myself to be on Facebook. There's little (as far as I can tell) to stop me from creating multiple profiles and picking from a Chinese menu of characteristics for each. That may sound simple, but it's a complete upending of the "one person, one profile" idea of identity that has carried Facebook this far.