In the complicated web of social media sites and networks, you have to navigate carefully.
Lacking a great centralized identication/contact/group/interest management system that interfaces will all of my social networks ( anyone? please??), I did a lot of my separation via the networks themselves.
- LinkedIn? Strictly professional.
- Facebook? Strictly family and real life friends ( who else wants to see silly updates about my kids and the gardens)
- Twitter? some odd place inbetween– mostly for my geeky friends/virtual friends and contacts and people with whom I am mostly just unreserved me.
- LastFM? Pandora? ( and some older, now defunct ones…) the musical me.
- Foursquare?GoWalla? The public, tourist me
- GetGlue? Media Maven me
- This Blog? Geeky, parenting, gardening me
- Diaspora? undefined, testing…
- ( oh and I just added pinterest.. and there are tumblr,posterous and startupli.st as well….
My user name on Twitter, LastfM, Pandora, 4Square, GetGlue, etc.. is purposefully the same. It is easy to cross reference and find me. If you are interested in all the same things that I am, you might follow or track me on multiple networks. But if you could care less about media recommendations, etc.. you probably don’t hang out on GetGlue and I try not to clutter my other streams with that ( except for FreeMusic Finds Tuesdays, which I share out on Twitter and sometimes FB).
I do NOT cross post things between Twitter and Facebook. I am a family oddity, most of the people connected to me on FB are fairly non-geeky, so my Twitter posts would bore or confuse them. I rarely link this blog on FB, it always goes to Twitter. My EDS blog goes to FB and rarely to Twitter.
It was a very clean system( if somewhat complicated). Then life happened. I connected with a whole bunch of EDS folks on Twitter, who wants links to that blog there. The more active I become in the (local) Indy entrepreneur circles, the more real life people request Facebook Connections and now I have a bunch of geeky folks connected to me on Facebook as well. Acting as Social Media Director for the Ft Wayne Regional Maker Faire is also connecting me to new people in new ways on Facebook. Then, of course, there is Empire Avenue that connects Twitter and Facebook and Blog streams in one place. Suddenly the Twitter=Geeky, Facebook=non geeky division is very blurry. I am building groups and using group restrictions for some of my posts, but honestly, it is awkward and there are too many people who belong to more than one group.
The “aspect” system on Join Diaspora is a little cleaner, but the audience is not there… and might make it there and might not. I am still searching for the best solution… how do you manage all of your alter identities on the web?
