There's always been a continuum of anonymity on the internet. Outside Facebook, participants in online communities have to decide on a case-by-case basis how m

There's always been a continuum of anonymity on the internet. Outside Facebook, participants in online communities have to decide on a case-by-case basis how much of their 'real' identity to make available. Because almost all online activity has traditionally been open, indexed, and publicly accessible, this has been the primary way that people have 'protected' themselves. Facebook inverts this: it requires you to use your real identity at all times, but partitions the online social space into a set of closed, private chambers. Security comes from isolation rather than anonymity. Facebook has been increasingly successful at working its way into the mechanics of online communities in general, and I think this is a real threat to the unique potential of the internet as a social space. When physical boundaries are irrelevant and people are free to choose how to participate - not just how much - communities emerge that are qualitatively different from the ones we live in offline. But when Facebook's model applies the social constraints of the offline world to the internet, we lose that uniqueness.