How Many Online Faces Do You Have?

Continuing with my post yesterday about how social networking sites miss the mark with their “friend” relationships I’d like to look at the number of faces you have (or would want to have) online and the implications that has on your relationships and how you use online communities.

If you’re like most people I know you can’t classify everyone you know as “friend”. There are family members, co-workers, neighbors, parents of your kids friends, people who share your hobby and if you’re lucky some long time personal friends. And that’s just the people you know in real life. If you’re active online you likely have “friends” that you’ve never met who participate in some online community.

Exposing Yourself to Your Friends

photo credit: akegThink carefully about how you interact with the various people you know in real life and you’ll see that you present many different faces to different people. How are you doing? To a neighbor it’s almost always something like “Not bad. You?”. To a close friend it might be a complaint about your job or some personal news “We’re expecting our second child.” People who you know only through a particular hobby will generally get an answer related to that hobby. Ask a poker player how they’re doing and you’ll hear something like “Took a couple bad beats but I’m still grinding out a small profit.”

photo credit: EVAN BAYHWhen you publish personal information online (through a blog, participation in a community or via a social networking site) you’re putting a certain face on yourself. On a community related to a hobby that face is generally the one you’d use within that hobby - on the poker forum you’ll go by your poker nickname and your identity will be tied to what you reveal about you poker playing. On a community based around your working field you’ll likely adopt something closer to a professional face. On a social network however your typically going to be revealing more details about your personal life and should be aware of who that information is exposed to. For example I don’t necessarily want to share details about my kids with just anyone - my poker buddies would be bored to tears and the general public contains some number of “bad people” who shouldn’t have access to personal information.

About Face

If you’ve determined that you need multiple online identities to handle the various aspects of your life how do you go about doing it? Do you run multiple blogs? Do you control access to your blog? If you use a social networking platform how do you go about expressing the nuances in your different relationships? While some online sites actually do allow you to segment the information you publish, most do not. For the most part if you want that separation you’re going to need to either run multiple blogs or multiple profiles in your social network. Beware also that some services might not support multiple profiles or if they require you to use your real name you might not be able to segment the areas of your life as neatly as you’d like.

Many who inhabit the world of blogging and social sites believe that they should openly expose all of their lives to anyone who cares to - see Scoble tweeting the birth of his child. Certainly that’s a viable option for some but think about both the implications of sharing your information widely - will anything you say hurt your chances to get a job or a future relationship - and also the needs of your reader - how many of Scoble’s reader really want a minute by minute account of childbirth?

Youth Culture?

I think some of the problems with social networks (or at least the ways in which they fail to meet my own needs) is caused by the fact that social networking is created by the young, for the young. At 38 I’m old in Internet terms. When I was 24 “friend” would be a good descriptor for nearly anyone in my life. Now that I’m over the hill the term fails to convey what I need out of my relationships. Do you find yourself wanting more nuanced relationship management online? And if so how do you deal with it?