I don’t use Twitter much; I guess that means I don’t use it well.  The same can be said for my blog and my personal website (which aren’t particularly connected to each other).  I’m pretty quiet on the web, and I think that may be detrimental.

But I can’t just start using everything more, because I have a problem.  There’s too many me’s on the web.

I’m one of the co-founders of Windsoc, and I have several web projects aside from that.  I’ve done quite a bit of consulting in the past, and I still do the odd one today.  I’ve also dabbled in politics, having run for office once and spent many hours on issues that I feel are important, such as youth recreation and city planning.  And I’m a part-time writer of speculative fiction, spending around 0.1 hours a week on it and seeing my literary career advance at the same rate as the snows of Kilimanjaro.  And then there’s that television series I was working on…

So which one of these “hats” do I wear on Twitter?  I worry about annoying followers by talking about the wrong things, so I generally say nothing at all.  My personal blog has always been political, so I don’t feel it makes sense to start talking about startups or technology or programming.  And there are many things I just can’t say on the Windsoc Blog, since I’m not the only one involved in this venture.

I can’t imagine I’m the only person with this problem.  I’ve thought about ways of fixing it, from having multiple Twitter accounts, websites and blogs, to simply categorizing entries with hashtags or other devices and accepting that some people will just find me too noisy.  But I think there needs to be a rethink here, a new way of segregating aspects of an identity.

We’ve played around with this at Windsoc for a while, with the idea of creating circles and channels to organize and focus an individual’s online contributions.  Such a system interfaces well with Facebook, but fails miserably on Twitter because there is no private messaging within the timeline.  Now if direct messages showed up in the timeline and didn’t always send an e-mail, things would be much different and the Windsoc Social Client would probably be out there for people to use.

Maybe something can be done with Facebook now, a way of constantly segregating your feeds and posts based on your current “aspect”.  But would anyone really do that, or could they use the Pages feature to similar effect?  Or do we need a new service that is designed from the start to handle multiple aspects?  Or should I throw one on Twitter, one on LinkedIn, etc., and use a social aggregator to monitor and manage them all?

I don’t have the answer.  Not yet, anyway.  And I wish I did.  This identity crisis is deepening with every passing day.

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