In the Identity-realty market

• Financial Times report today that Facebook is very likely file for IPO in this year. Analysts expect Facebook valuation to be in the order of $80-$100 billion. 
  Facebook Statistics claim that they have 800 million active users.
• Twitter, as per the last valuation in 2011, is worth $8 billion. It is eyeing 2013 for IPO. 2011 Dec statistics tell that they have crossed 100 million user base.
• LinkedIn last year went for IPO and now its valuation is $7.2 billion. As per the LinkedIn statistics, the total user base in LinkedIn today is 135 million. LinkedIn is expected to touch an annual revenue of $139 million.

Just for a comparison benchmark, IBM's valuation after 100 years of its existence and annual revenue of around $100 billion is $226 billion.
Now consider the revenues of these 'social network' ventures.

• Facebook for instance has three quarter revenue of $2.5 billion.
• Twitter's revenue as per their forecast would be $140 million this year. 
• LinkedIn too is expected to touch an annual revenue of $139 million.

One obvious pattern is that the share-value is not proportional to the revenue for these ventures. It is clear that people are paying more for these companies not for their immediate earning, but what they promise in the long run. But what drives that valuation? If it is not earning, it must be their adoption base and the rate at which they are bringing new users. 800 million is a big number! Although there are lot of discourses about how LinkedIn's Value-prop is wide apart from that of Facebook, there is little doubt that user-base is the basic ingredient of growth and valuation for all these ventures and many others like GroupOn etc. In this social digital era, the capital of social network is user-base and the currency is user's i.e. Your digital identity. Remember what your Dad said? Nothing comes free, dear, in this world! You pay with your digital identity [uniqueness is your basic value] to avail free subscription to the service and the service provider appropriates the value of your identity by aggregating them and creating a virtual market for other businesses e.g. LinkedIn's sizable income comes from payment from Hiring agencies.
So how does it affect you? A lot or not much depending on your perspective. If you are a celebrity, your digital footprint practically defines your public image and you will be extremely careful to maintain what you intend it to portray about you. But if you are a celebrity, you are also a hot property for all these social ventures and to ensure that property remains hot, they need frequent updates about you, from you. Apparently there is a conflict of interest between you and the social venture here.
What if you are not a celebrity?
One nagging aspect of the Internet footprint is there is nothing transitory. Unlike your real conversation, the digital footprint of yours is permanent in nature. They will remain there even after 10-20 years, indexed and ordered by search engines for anyone else to simply search and find out. So even if you are not exactly a public persona, you are public for those who want to find out information or history about you. Liability of the analysis and interpretation of those information that you casually shared in those social sites [blog posts such as this, twitter posts, facebook scruples] are transferred on you with direct impact on how you are viewed as a person. Imagine your new date coming to meet you armed with all these information and validating them as you try to impress her! Or your potential employer collecting all these information before they decide whether to call you or not?
Fact is these kind of researches were carried earlier too, it is just that these online social portals make the information ordered and accessible at the click of a mouse and that is something new.
So what do you do now? Will you stay away from all the fun and frolics of these social casinos? Can you? I doubt it! After all, need to belong is one of our basic needs. Like I mentioned in my last post, each technological shift brings new type of behavioural shift in us. While the immediate and boundary-less updates and faceless nature of the conversations [visual and textual] are the gifts that we will continue to enjoy, we will also learn to live with the liability of information-persistence that these gifts bring with it. Perhaps it will help us to evolve collectively as a better race.
But one thing is for sure, there is no way back!