Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Actuaries Engineer Anti-Social Media


The proliferation of Facebook masks a simple truth.   Some people are and always will be anti-social.  It is against their nature to publish their lives, to paste their pictures on a virtual space, to describe their thoughts in 140 character snippets.
Most prominent among this crowd are actuaries.  In response to the social media, they have developed several new websites under the umbrella Anti-Social Media.
Faceless Book is an online site where users post events and pictures from their private life. The difference between this and Facebook is that there is no sharing involved.  Everything is completely private.  One user, who obviously wishes to remain anonymous, said “this is my own little virtual world, where no one can bug me.  I can say I like The Hobbit previews without fear of someone else knowing about it.”
Mutter is a Twitter-like program where users can share small text blurbs.  However they only exist for one tenth of a second before they are erased entirely.
Un-link is a web based tool that allows users to distance themselves from other people online.  It analyzes who in your inner circle might try to contact you and hides your online presence from them.
They are currently partnering with Google to work on Google Minus.
One might ask why actuaries designed and created these programs.   The answer is that they very well may not be the only ones who have.   In fact there could be thousands of these types of online communities, which by their very nature will never be discovered.

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