Jimmy Gilmore

Not so long ago, back when Sec­ond Life was the next com­ing, the com­mon belief was peo­ple didn’t want to be them­selves online. They wanted to be some­one bet­ter, some­one a dif­fer­ent sex, some­one with a bet­ter job and more money or all of the above.

A lot has changed since then. Liv­ing online has become com­mon place – it’s no longer just intro­verts liv­ing fan­tasy lives. Heck, my retired step mom is on Face­book everyday.

The inter­est­ing thing here is now that every­one is there, peo­ple online are start­ing to play by sim­i­lar rules they use offline. Like when the wild west was finally set­tled and women moved out, peo­ple are finally start­ing to behave like a polite soci­ety on the Web. In fact, there’s a new study that says social net­work pro­files are down right accu­rate to the offline personality.

And you know, it makes a lot of sense once you think about it. Can you imagine:

Find­ing a job a with a fake Linkedin Profile?

Keep­ing up with friends on Face­book using an avatar of the oppo­site sex?

Or shar­ing media with fam­ily online with a silly screen name?

It’s no longer a free for all online. And that makes it more excit­ing to me.