309) Social Reconnaissance

(Unrelated video from last night's LES film festival. I'm a sucker for stop motion.)

I've been thinking a lot recently about how much you can find out about a near-stranger online. Not in the "privacy is dead" sense, but how completely you can get an idea of a person and what they're like, just by studying their online presence.

Of course, you can easily get the basics from LinkedIn, whatever's left public on the Info tab on Facebook, or a professional blog (given you have a full name and one other piece of identifying info - city, company, etc). But you can also add texture by looking at tweets, personal blog content, Facebook statuses (if public), Flickr and/or Vimeo accounts. You start to get a more rounded out idea of the person.

These days, it's not uncommon for employers to gather some preemptive info on an applicant before an interview. But what about purely social reconnaissance? Is being better informed about someone a good thing? We can screen for crazies, and maybe we'll score a few brownie points by bringing up things that we know they like. Or are our creepy, stalkerish ways simply taking away from the magic of getting to know someone?

And vice versa, does knowing that some people's first encounters with us will be online affect what we put out there? I'm trying to imagine the kind of person someone who's never met me in real life thinks I am, based solely on reading my blog, or following my tweets. Ideally it's an accurate reflection, but researchers will tell you that anyone who knows they're being studied won't act 100% authentically.