Do you really want to share your clickstream and search history with the world? I’m not convinced…yet.
I think it’s like wearing clothes. You don’t reveal all of yourself when you’re out walking around. You control your level of exposure, and you dress yourself up in clothes that express you. Sharing your raw click or search streams is like walking around naked. Some people are into that, but most would rather express themselves through controlled channels like blog posts, social bookmarks, photo uploads and such.
But as Greg pointed out, we are all naked to the servers that we surf.
Fred Wilson has no problem with letting it all hang out. He says “I am not a fan of privacy (clearly). I believe privacy gets in the way of discovery and learning.” He uses RootMarkets’ worm widgets to show his latest page visits and searches in real time. (Shameless self promotion: This is powered by the Attention Recorder Firefox extension, which I authored last fall.)
For myself, I’m going to keep a tighter reign on my revelations. But then, who would have imagined how willing people would be to share so much of themselves on MySpace? Maybe I’m just being old? I’ll have to think harder about this.