Public vs. Private: Cat Got Your Tongue?

Cast your minds back to Spring 1997. Tony Blair wasn't Prime Minister. No one had heard of Monica Lewinsky. I was a fresh-faced post-grad student studying this thing called the internet that seemed to consist solely of porn and pages where people put up pictures of their cats.

The cat folks got a lot of stick at the time. Their sites were lacking in interesting content, engaging analysis, wit. Lacking in pretty much everything. Except cats. And yet, in hindsight, the cat folks can be seen as the true harbingers of the future. They grasped what the internet was about in a way that Bill Gates or Marc Andreessen never did. It's not just about ecommerce or web-enabled architectures. It's about redrawing the boundaries between the public and the private. You wouldn't normally get to see pictures of a stranger's cat. Partly because you wouldn't necessarily want to. But mostly because prior to publicly accessible P2P publishing environment, you simply couldn't.

The current corporate debates around social software (Is it a good thing? What if they say bad things about us?) are attempts to understand how these boundaries are changing or to prevent these changes from occurring.

And these changes are both wonderful and scary. We don't know where we'll end up. And who will be able to see us there.

Maybe we can hide behind the cats.