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?
My Identity Crisis: Why can’t I be more than one thing on the web?
21–30 of 36 posts
Re: My Identity Crisis: Why can’t I be more than one thing on the web?
#22Oh, 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...
Re: My Identity Crisis: Why can’t I be more than one thing on the web?
#23I 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.
Re: My Identity Crisis: Why can’t I be more than one thing on the web?
#24Oh, 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...
Or multiple incognito windows...
Re: My Identity Crisis: Why can’t I be more than one thing on the web?
#25I 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...
Re: My Identity Crisis: Why can’t I be more than one thing on the web?
#26I 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…
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.…
Well in my case I have a rule. I don't friend anyone on facebook I've never met personally of that I'm currently working with. Everyone is pretty understanding about it.
Re: My Identity Crisis: Why can’t I be more than one thing on the web?
#27I 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.
Re: My Identity Crisis: Why can’t I be more than one thing on the web?
#28So 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…
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.
Re: My Identity Crisis: Why can’t I be more than one thing on the web?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
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 pe…
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?
Re: My Identity Crisis: Why can’t I be more than one thing on the web?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pe…
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?
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.