

My Identity Crisis: Why can’t I be more than one thing on the web? - wolfrom
http://blog.windsoc.co/2011/06/07/my-identity-crisis-why-cant-i-be-more-than-one-thing-on-the-web/

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lusis
I think I've found a healthy balance. I don't use twitter for generally
personal stuff (except for the occasional twitter commiserating with other
parents) and I don't use Facebook for any technical stuff.

My blog is mostly technical and the only place I'm even linked to the company
I work for is LinkedIn.

I don't _HIDE_ that fact that the two "personas" are connected but I try to
keep a separation in place. My family and most of my friends don't care about
the technical stuff and most of the people in the various OSS communities
could give two shits about my kids pooping in the potty.

Shit, I've even got two about.me profiles.

~~~
Jun8
This solves the problem only up to a point: How to group and filter among the
hundreds of FB friends, some are family, some are colleagues, some are close
friends, etc. FB has a mechanism to do lists, post filtering, etc, but I find
it to be clunky so don't use it. The result is like you have _all_ you
acquaintances in one room, shout what you want to say, and people who are not
interested will tune it out. Not ideal. But I can't think of a better
alternative.

~~~
joebadmo
I think the answer in a post-FB/Twitter decentralized/distributed social
network world is to have transient, easily spun-up and spun-down social
networks that you could think of as places.

So, for work friends, I'd make (or join) a social network called WorkBuddies,
and I'd have a different one for each context. But you'd take your identity
with you, and you'd own your own canonical social graph independent of the
people in each network.

~~~
czph
I have also got the same problem within FB: Most of my friends don't care
about tech/startups so I'm hesitant e.g. about commenting on Techcrunch.

Your approach sounds interesting, and it corresponds well with how you take on
different personalities in different settings in real life.

Do you know of that is what Diaspora is trying to do?

~~~
joebadmo
I think they're doing something functionally similar, which is basically
contact list management into groups. They call it "Aspects" iirc.

I think the problem with that is that it creates weirdly asynchronous or non-
cohesive groups. I.e. if I have a list called work friends, it's not
necessarily the same as your list called work friends, and the stuff I share
to my list doesn't go to the same set of people.

In the "Places" paradigm, the groups would be more canonical and autonomous
and transparent to the people in the group.

~~~
macgirvin
But my work friends aren't your work friends. Our friend circles might overlap
but they aren't the exact same. So why should you be posting to my work
friends group? Don't get me wrong - I think you have an interesting concept
here, I'm just trying to understand it better. (I wrote Friendika, which is
kind of like Diaspora but a bit more capable - I could probably make something
like this happen.).

~~~
joebadmo
Well, if we don't work together, we wouldn't share a work friends group.

It's true that a places metaphor is a bit less granular, but I think it makes
it easier to understand how things are being shared than a bunch of one to
many connections that overlap to varying degrees.

Also, there's no reason you couldn't have both, since the places metaphor is
really in practice just a subset of everyone having individual group lists.

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andywood
I relate to this very strongly, and it's the #1 thing stopping me from
publicizing my work more. I see a lot of comments saying things like "I don't
see the problem; I use X for work and Y for personal life." That isn't the
problem.

The problem is having lots of different, separate audiences, each across
several different sites. I'm a composer wanting to grow an audience for my
music, a professional software developer wanting to develop my day-job career,
a 3D engine developer wanting to write up my realtime rendering research and
correspond with other graphics programmers, an indie game developer wanting to
cultivate a following for my game, a paraglider wanting to communicate
constantly with other paragliders about weather and flying opportunities, and
finally a regular guy wanting to keep up with friends and family about more
ordinary things.

Each of those subjects has a separate audience that hardly overlaps with the
others. The worst part is that most of those things could use a Twitter
account for daily updates and engagement, a blog for more detailed write-ups,
and a YouTube channel for video or music. The music probably wants a
SoundCloud account. Some of those things want separate email accounts. Some
want dedicated web sites.

Having a properly rounded web presence seems like a nightmare of account
management. I imagine keeping a spreadsheet with a huge matrix of login info.
It's possible to do it - it just seems daunting and hard to manage
effectively.

------
DanielKehoe
So what's the problem? Bits are in short supply so we can't have multiple
websites or social network accounts? I've got two Twitter accounts, one for
technical tweets for my peers who are Rails developers, another for personal
tweets that mostly just amuse me, and if I got into knitting tea cosies I'd
probably start a separate Twitter account for that. Same with Facebook: an
account for my old high school friends and their political rants; and another
for my professional network, where I feel political attitudes or religious
viewpoints are as out-of-place as any other workplace.

The biggest problem with running multiple accounts is a UI issue. Many
services (such as Facebook) assume you will have only identity and make it
difficult to switch between accounts because they save some state (setting a
cookie). But one can use separate browsers or install a browser extension that
makes it easy to switch sessions. And many third-party apps (such as
Hootsuite) recognize users are likely to have multiple accounts. Heck, the
latest version of the Twitter native client allows multiple accounts and even
Google is making it easier to set up and switch among multiple accounts.

We just need more developers recognizing that we have multifaceted
personalities and accommodating multiple personas for our presence online. No
harm in that.

~~~
andywood
I struggle constantly with this problem. As I see it, the main practical
problem is that services have a 1-to-1 mapping from identity to account. This
is compounded by the fact that the services often depend on one another - e.g.
when I need a unique email address to sign up for some service, then for every
account I need on that service, I also have to go create yet another gmail
account.

I wish I could have just one identity, that is me-facing, but many accounts,
that are audience-facing. I wish I could log into YouTube as Andy Wood, and
manage all my accounts (3D graphics demos, domino toppling, paragliding, etc).

In fact, WordPress.com works just like this, and I love it. Google, YouTube,
and Twitter, by contrast, seem borderline resistant to this type of usage -
meaning they all force me to keep creating new email accounts in addition to
the multiple service accounts, even when I really don't want another email
account.

~~~
fgumo
One relatively easy solution for your email accounts problem: buy a domain,
set up Google Apps, create a user and make that email address catch-all.

Now you can have as many email addresses as you want without needing to create
them one by one. And if you work it a little more you can even answer as any
of them and apply filters.

------
fgumo
I have similar problems, but they are worse. Add to the mix suffered by the
author working and having friends in a couple of countries/languages and you
get my scenario.

I tried with one twitter account per language and doing groups in facebook,
but it was too time consuming. Now I mix both languages with care and some
won't like it, but I can't go further.

------
mdoerneman
I am currently working on shaping my identity on the web and I feel exactly
the same way. I think I'm going to use Facebook for personal use (family &
friends) and twitter/blog for technical. If I happen to make a friend on the
technical side, I can request them as a friend on Facebook and open them up to
the rest of my life.

------
ptarjan
You can use Facebook lists to only post things to a set of people you want to.
Or Facebook groups if you don't even want to be friends with them but want a
group communication channel.

<http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=768>

------
jacobr
Being bi-lingual adds even another dimension.

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hm2k
I joined the internet in a time when everyone had a "handle" or nickname.

I built up quite a reputation under this nick, but perhaps not enough in the
right direction.

Now I find myself going back to the drawing board and building a reputation in
my own name.

This also inevitably leads to the dual identity as I struggle to leave the
alias behind...

------
juiceandjuice
I feel the exact same way. For a long time now, I've set up facebook friends
in groups, and I use twitter but only with best friends, never coworkers,
roommates, former friends, etc... Twitter is my outlet.

I was working on a site like twitter but with much more anonymous features and
hierarchal posting interactions, and security features, largely motivated by
both the iranian election and arab spring, but I got sidetracked and bored of
the project pretty quickly, ultimately realizing that there's not really an
elegant all-encompassing solution to the situation.

------
jonathanwallace
Seems like this is an area ripe for a startup. All of these comments
commiserating and not one can point to an application or service that helps
solve this problem?

------
wccrawford
Wait, is he really trying to suggest that in real life, he talks to everyone
the same way? That as a CEO he talks to clients the same way he talks to his
drinking buddies? (Assuming he has them.)

Why would the internet be any different? If you want to mass communicate,
you're going to have to sort your people into categories and communicate with
them according to that.

Because that's what it comes down to. Mass communication.

~~~
cobralibre
No, he's saying the opposite. He's pointing out that most online
communications channels haven't solved the problem of filtering your output to
specific audiences as you deem appropriate. For any single service, you're
generally either communicating one-to-one or one-to-everybody, with no options
inbetween.

This is a problem that is more easily managed in "real life" by the obvious
limitations of presence.

~~~
wccrawford
And easily managed on the web by having multiple twitter accounts or email
lists.

I really don't see the issue, and I think that's why nobody has done anything
about it.

~~~
wolfrom
One big issue for me is that I only have one name. I think it's asking too
much of people trying to connect with me to have to choose between four
Twitter accounts or 2-3 Facebook profiles.

------
eftpotrm
Oh, it's not that tricky....

I only have one Facebook profile but I certainly know others with more than
one. I do, on the other hand, have two Flickr photostreams for very different
categories of work.

OK, the websites only cache one login via their cocokies, but that's a
solvable problem. I use Firefox for one profile and Chrome for the other,
works well enough for me...

~~~
ellyagg
Or multiple incognito windows...

------
wibblenut
I'm looking forward to decentralised microblogging, since then we can publish
multiple feeds (RSS would seem ideal) from the same identity (domain), e.g. $
dig andy.tel naptr|grep rss - there'd also be a record to delegate a "hub" for
my followers to subscribe to.

------
Fooman
You worry about annoying your followers by talking about the wrong topic.
Sounds like preaching to the choir.

Flip the coin.

You can be more interesting by providing information or point of view that
isn't expected. Embrace your broadness and don't siphon yourself off into well
defined silos.

~~~
cobralibre
It's not unreasonable to want our communications media to facilitate siloed
interaction.

I look at it this way: If somebody I know avoids talking to me about that
things that bore me -- say, pro football or New York Times bestsellers -- I
wouldn't see that as a lack of boldness or a species of dishonesty; I would
see that as a form of consideration for my time.

~~~
ecaradec
As a user I've unfollowed twitter accounts that were developers but as there
was sport literally flood my timeline with comments. It's a question of volume
thought. I don't care about the occasionnal comments on things that doesn't
interess me.

------
scottkrager
I use twitter for work/startup stuff and facebook for friends/non-work

