Didn't the Beatles keep their name when they changed from pop to cutting-edge experimental songwriting? Don't we all (er, mostly all) keep our own names as we grow up and change?
Being a singularly self-obsessed person, I've gone through several noticeable Facebook phases. At one point I unfriended all but 40 people, to limit noise, deleted profile information, to avoid being easily judged, and got rid of pretty much everything from my profile. Now that filters exist (as well as for a few other reasons), I've become much more open and expressive, friended a bunch of people I don't actually know (including people from HN), and changed things. I've gone through similar things with blog writing and web design.
People aren't scared about the future. Very few people censor themselves, even knowing people are watching them. Perhaps we've developed a conscious blindness to our numerous followers. Perhaps we just really could care less. Either way, people aren't going to worry about their pasts for long. Even when it's there, the attitude of people I know is, "Either they won't be damned to look far into the past, or it's entirely unreasonable for them to judge me for who I was three years ago - or for who I am outside of work."
That's a good attitude to have. You can determine some things by how a person acts when they aren't watching - but not everything. I have a bunch of wise, friendly, sweet friends who like getting wasted, and a bunch of wise, friendly, sweet friends who go to debate championships on the weekend. I've met introverts and extroverts that I liked. I'm friends with a few fairly racist people and a few fairly sexist people, and each one is a good person despite all the stuff they do, and some of them are people I'd really like in a working environment because despite all that, they're good workers. Overjudgmentalism is a character flaw, and it's one that there's going to be rising hostility towards if companies start getting anal about things like blogs and Facebook. Facebook won't be forgotten: those old manners of thinking will be.
If you are wrong, then anyone who does censor themselves is in for a major competitive gain. If you are right, they haven't lost much. Facebook isn't a very big part of life.
You could argue that you can lock yourself away from people, stay in solitude, and spend all your time learning and trying to make money, and that gives you a competitive gain. But that ignores how important and useful friends are.
Like it or not, people today talk a lot on Facebook. I talk to people back at my high school fairly often. I keep in touch with people I couldn't keep in touch with otherwise. And with the various dramas and photos and notes that appear on Facebook, I've both had some interesting experiences with people and I've preserved memories of things that've happened offline.
Maybe I lose something by having that all online (mind you, in a place where only 90 other people can see it, rather than in some place public), but I gain far more. It's similar to how I'm willing to write about personal matters on my blog. I can imagine an employee coming across my writing about a failed relationship or about incidents about college, but I gain more from being able to publish my thoughts candidly than I lose from their disapproval.
My line of thinking goes: if my employer is such an ass as to search through my past to see if I've done questionable things, then either I've done a piss-poor job of making myself into a good candidate, or he's not somebody worth my working for. Either way, the fault is not my past: it's my, or my employer's, present.
You don't think there are any other options besides hermitage or ubiquitous sharing of personal life and thoughts?
Anyways, obviously I'm not against others being open about themselves like you recommend. Even if what I say is right that doesn't exclude your point about the kind of person you want to work for. People just may not find the reticent lifestyle is for them. However, there are people in this world who are comfortable with keeping to themselves, and they may have more opportunities in the future.
Kids, who will inevitably want to drive a stake into the heart of former lives, may simply abandon the service (remember Friendster?) and find something new: something still unformed, yet to be invented — much like themselves.
I suspect that is what will happen. Going off on a tangent, the idea comes to me that perhaps some sort of meta-Facebook site might appear in the future that will be to the children of today what Facebook is to the "oldsters".
We join Facebook and encounter old friends and old photographs posted by old friends. Maybe they will join meta-Facebook and find old profiles of old friends that link to their own old profiles.
What, out of curiosity, would prompt them to leave a service that all their friends use? There needs to be something so useful that I'll join a new site and leave behind all my old friends. I don't see that happening with Facebook.
Hmm, like the quote says, remember Friendster? Anyway, the same things that prompt all of us to drift apart from old friends, I should think. New friends and social circles, different lifestyles, different jobs, different priorities, different interests, etc. The same things happen online. I'm sure many people have irc channels/forums/games/sites they used to visit daily and members from that site they used to confide their deepest secrets to. I know I have. Now they're all no longer a part of my life.
I used to visit Facebook daily too, but I've mostly stopped visiting it, except when someone uses it to send me event invitations or someone tells me to go view pictures there. For everything else, there's IM. The thing is, if someone is really a friend of mine, then I don't need Facebook to stay in touch with them. If not, then I don't need to stay in touch with them, so sites like Facebook really had no intrinsic draw for me besides novelty or perhaps a business opportunity.
Now my main guilty pleasure is HN, and none of my friends are here. Then again, I am a bit of a loner, so this could just reflect my own atypical usage patterns and you could well be right in that most people will use Facebook for the rest of their lives. I doubt it though. I don't think Facebook addresses a need as fundamental as Google does.
I use facebook for showing my twitter updates (as most of my friends don't use twitter), showing my google reader shares (as most of my friends don't have google reader) and for event planning. The ability to easily share videos and photos also helps greatly. My last couple of birthdays were a little different and people took a little convincing. The hardest one was convincing people to buy into throwies, as you're "throwing money" around the city. Facebook make that possible without having to convince every single person myself. Once I got a group going they were convincing each other. And yes, everyone had a lot of fun. =)
Being a singularly self-obsessed person, I've gone through several noticeable Facebook phases. At one point I unfriended all but 40 people, to limit noise, deleted profile information, to avoid being easily judged, and got rid of pretty much everything from my profile. Now that filters exist (as well as for a few other reasons), I've become much more open and expressive, friended a bunch of people I don't actually know (including people from HN), and changed things. I've gone through similar things with blog writing and web design.
People aren't scared about the future. Very few people censor themselves, even knowing people are watching them. Perhaps we've developed a conscious blindness to our numerous followers. Perhaps we just really could care less. Either way, people aren't going to worry about their pasts for long. Even when it's there, the attitude of people I know is, "Either they won't be damned to look far into the past, or it's entirely unreasonable for them to judge me for who I was three years ago - or for who I am outside of work."
That's a good attitude to have. You can determine some things by how a person acts when they aren't watching - but not everything. I have a bunch of wise, friendly, sweet friends who like getting wasted, and a bunch of wise, friendly, sweet friends who go to debate championships on the weekend. I've met introverts and extroverts that I liked. I'm friends with a few fairly racist people and a few fairly sexist people, and each one is a good person despite all the stuff they do, and some of them are people I'd really like in a working environment because despite all that, they're good workers. Overjudgmentalism is a character flaw, and it's one that there's going to be rising hostility towards if companies start getting anal about things like blogs and Facebook. Facebook won't be forgotten: those old manners of thinking will be.