from Hacker News

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

by wolfrom on 6/7/11, 3:56 PM with 34 comments

• by lusis on 6/7/11, 4:40 PM

  I 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 and most of my friends don't care about the technical stuff and most of the people in the various OSS communities could give two shits about my kids pooping in the potty.

  Shit, I've even got two about.me profiles.

• by andywood on 6/7/11, 9:57 PM

  I 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.

• by DanielKehoe on 6/7/11, 6:07 PM

  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 their political rants; and another for my professional network, where I feel political attitudes or religious viewpoints are as out-of-place as any other workplace.

  The biggest problem with running multiple accounts is a UI issue. Many services (such as Facebook) assume you will have only identity and make it difficult to switch between accounts because they save some state (setting a cookie). But one can use separate browsers or install a browser extension that makes it easy to switch sessions. And many third-party apps (such as Hootsuite) recognize users are likely to have multiple accounts. Heck, the latest version of the Twitter native client allows multiple accounts and even Google is making it easier to set up and switch among multiple accounts.

  We just need more developers recognizing that we have multifaceted personalities and accommodating multiple personas for our presence online. No harm in that.

• by fgumo on 6/7/11, 5:24 PM

  I have similar problems, but they are worse. Add to the mix suffered by the author working and having friends in a couple of countries/languages and you get my scenario.

  I tried with one twitter account per language and doing groups in facebook, but it was too time consuming. Now I mix both languages with care and some won't like it, but I can't go further.

• by mdoerneman on 6/7/11, 5:07 PM

  I am currently working on shaping my identity on the web and I feel exactly the same way. I think I'm going to use Facebook for personal use (family & friends) and twitter/blog for technical. If I happen to make a friend on the technical side, I can request them as a friend on Facebook and open them up to the rest of my life.

• by ptarjan on 6/7/11, 6:51 PM

  You can use Facebook lists to only post things to a set of people you want to. Or Facebook groups if you don't even want to be friends with them but want a group communication channel.

  http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=768

• by jacobr on 6/7/11, 5:19 PM

  Being bi-lingual adds even another dimension.

• by hm2k on 6/7/11, 8:52 PM

  I 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...

• by juiceandjuice on 6/7/11, 8:20 PM

  I 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.

• by jonathanwallace on 6/7/11, 7:34 PM

  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?

• by wccrawford on 6/7/11, 4:37 PM

  Wait, is he really trying to suggest that in real life, he talks to everyone the same way? That as a CEO he talks to clients the same way he talks to his drinking buddies? (Assuming he has them.)

  Why would the internet be any different? If you want to mass communicate, you're going to have to sort your people into categories and communicate with them according to that.

  Because that's what it comes down to. Mass communication.

• by eftpotrm on 6/7/11, 8:04 PM

  Oh, 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...

• by wibblenut on 6/7/11, 4:19 PM

  I'm looking forward to decentralised microblogging, since then we can publish multiple feeds (RSS would seem ideal) from the same identity (domain), e.g. $ dig andy.tel naptr|grep rss - there'd also be a record to delegate a "hub" for my followers to subscribe to.

• by Fooman on 6/7/11, 4:33 PM

  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.

• by scottkrager on 6/7/11, 6:18 PM

  I use twitter for work/startup stuff and facebook for friends/non-work