My Identity Crisis: Why can’t I be more than one thing on the web? • Hacker News Board

Re: My Identity Crisis: Why can’t I be more than one thing on the web?

#31

Post by sp332 » Wed, Jun 08, 2011, 12:57 AM UTC

wccrawford wrote: post #15

cobralibre wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I can't keep FaceBook (or most other social sites) in two tabs, each in a different account. As soon as you log in with the second account, refreshing the first tab will send you to the second account as well.

Most sites just don't support multiple logins.

Re: My Identity Crisis: Why can’t I be more than one thing on the web?

#32

Post by macgirvin » Wed, Jun 08, 2011, 6:13 AM UTC

joebadmo wrote: post #30

czph wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "P…

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.).

Re: My Identity Crisis: Why can’t I be more than one thing on the web?

#33

Post by ecaradec » Wed, Jun 08, 2011, 1:42 PM UTC

cobralibre wrote: post #11

Fooman wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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.

Re: My Identity Crisis: Why can’t I be more than one thing on the web?

#34

Post by fgumo » Thu, Jun 09, 2011, 12:18 AM UTC

andywood wrote: post #28

DanielKehoe wrote: post #13

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…

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 on…

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.

Re: My Identity Crisis: Why can’t I be more than one thing on the web?

#35

Post by zwadia » Thu, Jun 09, 2011, 5:05 AM UTC

jonathanwallace wrote: post #21

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?

We're moving in the right direction, miles to go though! http://secretsocial.com

Re: My Identity Crisis: Why can’t I be more than one thing on the web?

#36

Post by joebadmo » Thu, Jun 09, 2011, 3:25 PM UTC

macgirvin wrote: post #32

joebadmo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "P…

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.).

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.