I really like it that my online-identity is fractured into hundred small bits.
Can you imagine the privacy-implications of one central marketing company owning _every_ profile about you?

We've already got some websites on the net like Gravitar working to solve the uploading avatars on blogs problem, so why can't this be made slightly for these sorts of community websites?

Welcome to the postmodern condition!

Insightful post.

To some extent, it is a real pain to have several different messengers and different social networks. To another extent, if I post on some forums somewhere, I might not want everyone to know about my personal information.
And blogs that deal in some area, should stay in that area and not post about irrelevant things.

I think in some ways it reflects our decision to only show parts of ourselves to some people and the Internet's company's decision to make money with their different products.

I actually have 2 major online identities.
The first, Tom Clarke, is used on Facebook, and other places where people need to know me as me.
The second "deworde", is used for forums, online games and anything else where my name is irrelevant.

Someone wise once wrote "that's not writing - that's typing". I think, when it comes to blogs, you could add "that's not living - that's typing". Most of the blogs I've come across remind me of Geocities - people talking about their pet rabbit, their dumpy girlfriend, and why they prefer this to that brand of shampoo. Coding Horror is, to me, more than just a blog because in some of the articles there is information I can learn from, and I'll flick through the 3 or 4 other bookmarked IT-related blgos on a roughly weekly basis to see if there's anything informative there too, but really I think if people spend that much time talking about stuff in 20 or 30 different places they've got some sort of problem that needs professional help. It's a little like vanity publishing, isn't it?

I'd like to recommend `here comes another bubble` - an amusing YouTube video - but it keeps getting taken down. Worth searching for though.

From Ghost Hunter to Coder ?

Can not help who I am . . .

Its the public that just wants to see one simple personality. I do not hide who I am or what I do, but Ghost Hunters do not want to know about my coding and the coders do not want to know about my Ghost Hunting..

What is my reality identity?
The guy at the job?
The one playing games with friends?
The father of a little family?
The one sitting in the living room in the middle of night reading?

It isn't that much of a difference.

See http://plaxo.com/

You been reading Scoble? :)
http://scobleizer.com/2007/12/13/can-we-get-a-first-step-in-social-networking-portability/

As someone who has half a dozen or so online "identities" (really just public accounts at different places), I feel like you're missing the point.

You ignore that those different online identities are mostly for different purposes. They're not all for blogging. Most are probably for keeping up with other people who are only on those services (especially the IM accounts, but also social sites like MySpace and LiveJournal). Some (Pandora, Last.fm) are for automatically tracking musical taste and then taking advantage of that information. Some are for pictures and videos. There isn't one site that does all this, or if there is, there wasn't when these people set up the various accounts.

Which brings me to my next thought. I doubt that either of these people go to all those different sites on a regular basis these days. First, RSS and other technologies have made is easier to gather updates from various sources at a glance. Second, technologies like OpenID (not to mention plain old corporate mergers, like Yahoo's purchase of Flickr and del.icio.us) now make it possible to use one site with an account from another site. Someone starting out now might not need to create as many accounts to use all those sites.

Finally, people who've been involved in blogging software for so long tend to be both involved personally in various places and employed in ways that make it necessary to have accounts in various places (and participate in them) just for work. If Anil Dash has been part of the Movable Type team, he's probably employed by Six Apart, which owns many blogging services.

I actually think that the ability to give oneself online identities is in itself more of a boon than a curse.

It allows you to reveal different aspects of your charachteristics to different people in different situations.For that matter, you may even choose to portray yourself as a completely different person than what you really are.

The headache of maintaining all these identities is a small price to pay as compared to how usefull all the identities can be.

It's just me, myself and I ...my ego, my super-ego, my id... my personal life, my professional life, my private thoughts, my happy moments, my sad moments, my social life, my private life, my family life.

We're not one thing to all people at all times.

There are many facets to any personality. You never display them all at the same time or to the same people. So why not have different parts of the web for the different aspects of your life and personality. It reflects human nature to do so.

Brian

More identities are are better than one or few. Having been where I had just a couple - and getting banned at one forum for my sometimes brash and smart-assed opinions bruised my ego far more than I was willing to admit for the longest time. Now I'm only marginally and superficially involved with a small handful. And a lot happier.

I'm seeing a shift from visiting as much sites as possible to using a few high quality websites in my own online life. Personally, I'm really trying to avoid those overhyped online "communities". Currently, the only forum I'm using is the biggest IT forum in the Netherlands, http://got.tweakers.net/. I've a profile there that is strongly linked to my own site. Recently I got a weblog (http://atlex.tweakblogs.net/blog) as a present from the company behind GoT, Tweakers.net, but I customized it so it is more an extension to my own site rather than a separate online PoP.

Many of my friends, colleagues and classmates are using a very overhyped, poor quality piece of junk called Hyves (hyves.nl) to stay in touch with their friends. But if I see a profile there, loaded with pictures of drunk people, poor written messages with spelling errors, and a list of 300 'friends' I'm glad I'm not using it. I think a PoP must reflect who you are, not who you want to be or what you are pretending to be.

Back to the 30+ online communities: If you feel the need to maintain so many online identities, consider this: a) Do I really need to have so many online identities, b), am I really going to use al this sites, and c), do I want to get associated with this site. I think it will be 3x "no" for most of the people.

Funny, I posted my own musings on this topic only a month ago: http://my.opera.com/claudeb/blog/2007/11/06/a-web-of-my-own. Briefly put, I'm with alphager and Mike on this. If I *can* have my identity scattered over the 'net, then why not? After all, it's an individual choice, not affecting anyone else.

Check out spokeo.com, it checks your friends' activities on a lot of different online communities. I was amazed about the amount of stuff it dugg out about my friends

In reply to Jonathan's comment above, the open source Pidgin IM client (http://pidgin.im - very good native Windows build too) enables you to use one client for a whole load of networks, including the commercial ones such as MSN and AOL.

It's a godsend to me as most of the non-tech people I speak to in North America use AOL, whilst most of us Brits use MSN (in my experience).

> Can you imagine the privacy-implications of one central marketing company owning _every_ profile about you?

OpenID hopes to avoid that.

When somebody asks me which is your website, I usually answers with my blog URL, but that is for the matter of simplicity. I have good enough number od accounts in many networks. But I am noticing a real difficulty myself in managing all these accounts. It will be a real good idea if we have a central place where we can manage (atleast view) activities.

OT:

> I struggle to write one lousy blog four to five times a week.

Your struggle is to our pleasure.

You posts are typically quite insightful where many blogs could vaporize without anyone noticing. Some (of us) just like to hear ourselves talk.

I would echo the thought that they all have different purposes.

I try to split my online identity between two major persona's, Andrew January which is who I am on Facebook and that is where I do things for the consumption of my friends - photo's of nights out, communication etc.

I then have my online persona of [ICR] (or increasingly aJanuary because websites are annoyingly restrictive) which I use for anything else on the internet. Forums, blogs, even my own blog.

I like that separation. I am not a simple being that can be summed up wholly by one identity. My friends are not really interested in the content of my blog, and people on the internet don't care that I got drunk last night.

Which one of them is the real me? Both of them.

I think some online identities fail where others succeed.

I went to high school in Turkey and most of my friends came to college here so I am using Facebook regularly to keep up with them; I have to say Facebook made it really easier for us to organize events, have little chat or share pictures -on our private groups mostly.

Last.fm basically requires no maintenance on my part; it keeps track of what I'm listening and I occasionally use it to listen to radio when I'm bored with my own music.

I have a reddit and digg account to vote and comments but have no profile. But still people can see what I like and stuff.

Del.icio.us is where all my links at and again it is basically no maintenance other than submitting the links.

I take a lot of pictures and use Flickr to store them all in a central and offsite location.

Basically what I'm trying to say is online profiles where some information is collected succeeds because rather than just creating a "profile", you use the service and you create your online identity by just being yourself. I disagree that you just have a central location for your online self; some services are just better than others.

I try not to have an online presence at all. I have a facebook account, even there all the info fields are left blank intentionally. People I don't know, have no need to know my interest in books and music, nor do I feel the desire to broadcast them.

There's a blurb about me on our university website, but the people that wrote it didn't even get my job description right.

I have one identity and it's mine not the worlds.

It's like a digital horcrux. At least you don't have to kill someone to make the new splinter of your identity.

Hey Now Jeff,
I personally think that it's good to have many profiles out there even if they only point back to an official home page. For instance if you had a myspace or facebook profile that pointed back to codinghorror.com. You don't have to maintain or post there but some people may only be into and go to myspace or facebook so you'd be able to reach them much more easily. Web 2.0 is here to stay, & I also think the biggest reason we go online is to interact with other people. I also think that it's nice to be broken into parts say a person's linked in profile is more business than a myspace which is nice. So after reading this post I'm now following my first person on tweeter.
Coding Horror Fan,
Catto

I've been thinking it would be nice to have a generic ID system. Nothing your social or credit cards are linked to, but something you could use at all the places that want you to 'check in'.

For instance, on my keychain, I have 4-5 barcodes for various stores or establishments, that I allow to know when I've visted. If we could create something like this, a universal 'ME' ID, not linked to anything special, other than our name, and preferences, and have it require a pin code or password, our wallets wouldn't be as heavy, and our digital life would be much smoother.

Something like this to carry with us:
ME_ID = 357951456852123456789
ME_Display_Name = John Doe

A central database would have something like this:
ME_ID = 357951456852123456789
ME_Display_Name = John Doe
ME_Passcode = xCQ#R@fvaslkdvj#@$ (Salted and Encrypted of course)

A site or store would have a way to swipe, and enter a pin. The site/store would check the central database to authenticate, then, if valid, the site/store could lookup any data they have on that person.

Again, nothing private, just something so I don't have to have so many store cards and password.

Thanks for the kind words! I should point out -- the list of IDs on my site is somewhat deliberately ridiculous. I wrote a bit about that when I put them on my site:

http://www.dashes.com/anil/2007/10/thanks-for-the-add.html

It's also probably worth mentioning that I think the proliferation of identities with so little control over how they're connected and exposed is a pretty serious problem, and one I'm lucky enough to get to try to fix at my day job:

http://www.sixapart.com/about/news/2007/09/were_opening_th.html

Thanks also for kicking off a great conversation -- I think it's a good sign so many of us are thinking about these things.

Anil's link list is more of a commentary of how ridiculous things have gotten than a useful summary of his online identity. Someone could standardize online profiles but few websites would participate.

take a look at this strip (and the next one)
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20071212

they describe the problem quite well

I like having disparate identities. My work networks don't need to know about my gaming, and vice versa. I can present myself as I need to be for each situation, just as in real life.

Add the obvious problems related to letting anyone "own" my sum identity, and I don't see any advantages.

I recently joined claimID (http://claimid.com) as a solution to this exact problem. It's a nice way to manage your online identities with OpenID.

Here's claimID profile of Fred Stutzman, one of the founders, as an example of how it works: http://claimid.com/fred

Best to keep identities separate.
There's one guy who has an interesting Usability blog, but it's on the same domain as his Martial Arts blog, and gets blocked by our corporate filter.

Keep the profiles separate. I could be interested in someone's technology blogging but not interested in their family or gaming profiles. I don't want to see everything coming to me in one downstream.
Less time for me to do the filtering.

I maintain my identity across 0 sites. Please don't let them find me. *Panics*

My solution to the "multiple identities" problem is simple: I maintain a single blog (raamdev.com) and add a link to it inside the profiles of other sites (various forums, Facebook, MySpace, Technorati, Digg, etc). I fill in as little personal information as possible in the hope that those who want to know more about me will visit my blog.

If that particular site is a social networking site, I add a note that says I won't respond to messages sent to me via that particular sites messaging mechanism and that the person must visit my blog to contact me.

The personalization of blogs is often more detrimental than beneficial, since personalizing a blog makes your personal life public -- it ceases to be your personal life. I wrote a post on this topic:
http://blog.raamdev.com/2007/02/27/the-impersonalization-of-blogs/

This is my first time commenting here on Coding Horror, but I'm a frequent reader and as a fellow programmer I enjoy the high quality of your posts. Thanks Jeff!

This was a bad idea when it was called MS passport and still a bad idea when its called openId.

No matter how many times I see that FUD and deliberate misinformation equating Passport and OpenID, I am still astounded at the intellectual dishonesty of it. Bravo, Mikester!

One of the first 30 weblogs? Right... because until 1998, nobody kept a regularly updated personal web site or anything. Nope... Nobody.

This is the same problems bands have - there's

MySpace
Sonicbids
Garageband
Eventful
...I could name a dozen more.

It would be great to have a client-side html editor that loads into each one of these sites.

I used to have a personal webpage, but I wanted to make one giant website that gave videogame news. However, without knowledge of PHP, updating it was a pain in the neck and none of my friends could contribute. On the way, I learned code that no one used, like how to create gradient background and gloss fonts using CSS.

Ahhh.... I smell existential angst. All of your personae are you. Just different aspects of you. No one, (well, no one should be anyhow) a single compartmentalized being. It's funny really. We as human beings are so great at putting things into little boxes of yes/no, good/evil red/blue/green/yellow/purple, especially in this digital age where everything can be reduced down to ones and zeros. People simply aren't one sided like that. I also don't believe that your wife is the only one who sees more to you than just one side, however i also believe there's more to you than even she witnesses. Things may lurk around hidden inside of you that you do not even perceive yourself.

On the other hand, perhaps it's the internet's anonymity and body-less-ness nature that allows the mind to split into these different personae so easily. It's just too damned simple to create a personality and simply consider it only text. In fact, the internet in general kind of reminds me too much of the Milgram Experiment for comfort.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obedience_to_authority

The further removed the subject is from the consequences of his actions, the less those consequences are perceived, and the less they are deemed real.

I'd worry more if this were the case and you couldn't tell which of of these kinds of identities were real.

the internet as your article obliquely points out, is very very new, yet is evolving at an alarming and unprecedented rate. I wouldn't be surprised if in ten years there's a whole chapter in the DSM-V.

> So choose carefully, and focus on those things that best represent you.

Being schizophrenic, I love this topic. j/k, I'm not really schizo.. or am I ?

Opinion only - it's refreshing to know that I mostly use the online environment and multiple identities to attempt to solve technical issues. I'm a fiend for technology and science. Whether it be school work, or actual employment, the odds are you can find me researching technology. I try to stay away from social networking, sometimes it can be fun to chat with friends(of whom the majority I am friends with face-to-face); I'm never really that bored when I'm online - which is for very long periods of time. When it boils down to personality, I'd like to think you're never gonna learn anything else about me other than the technical advice I give or the education I seek. To me, online == resource. If I'm bored I'll go play a game or walk away from my system. In technical forums, I find that using the same handle increases ones credibility.. although I'm not sure exactly how.... now I'm bored..

XBox Live is a nice solution to this problem for online gaming. On PC gaming (and every other console that now supports online gaming), you have a potentially different identity in every game you play (depending on how lucky you are at getting your name of choice). Even if you get the same name in Quake and Team Fortress, there is no way for other people to know they are t he same person. XBox Live introduced the concept of the Gamertag - a name, a short bio, a list of friends, a history of game accomplishments - that follow you around in EVERY game on the XBox platform (and now stretching into Games for Windows).
I didn't occur to me how important this is until I'd used it for a while, and then tried to use platforms that did not support it.

Doesn't Curly's Law (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000805.html) ("one thing") apply in this case too? Instead of trying to immortalize yourself on dozens of sites, just focus on one and let that be the gathering place for your readers. Jeff does that well here. The Vertigo RSS feed was another avenue of his, but I don't care read that one - 1 feed per blog author for me. I have enough as it is.

Who cares what you have to say on all the sites you visit, unless you're a stalker?
Seriously, I can't see any reason why what I say on slashdot has anything to do with what I say on TradeMe, a kiwi auction site.
So why would I want to let slashdot people know I buy (for example) books on maths, computers and european languages? Or for that matter, gifts for friends and family? You're not going to get an accurate picture of who I am by comparing those profiles.

If I really cared about what people think of me, I'd be on facebook all night. But I would rather take some time and release a smooth website later, possibly in january. With a view to adding pages while at uni.

I'll guess that most of those sites have content that is the same as the others. I have a feeling the people use those different sites to advertise their blogs and spread it to different crowds they don't reach on their blog and each site.

If someone wrote a tool to post the same content to each site it would be a very useful.

foaf

We use multiple identities because there are some, nosey, creepy, vindictive stalkers who care way too much about your other hobbies and interests. They're eager to dig for absolutely anything to discredit, humiliate, or shun you.

I am the man who doesn't exist!

I have no "blog". I believe a team of psychiatrists might be able to help someone who wanted to read my "internal monologue" posted to twitter but I don't want to be sued to pay the bills. Everyone I know who has a myspace page only got it because someone told them to, and it gets updated at most once every alternate lifetime anyway, and I refuse to be that sad.

So, according to the "when you're interviewing people you should check them on google" crowd, I don't actually even exist, yet alone deserve to ever have a job.

This is a good thing. Without that filter, I might risk being stuck with people psychologically incapable of surviving without their internet connection. ;)

I like things being centralized and distributed at the same time.

ISP's should be forced to be completely protocol neutral, so I can host all my own social networking stuff without doubling my bills.

On the other hand, I choose to rotate a list of website that I frequently update to (say 6 out of 10 only at any time), so if someday I feel tired/distracted and wish to disappear from the web for a while, I'd save the trouble of explaining... :P

I know of someone who use different login name to represent her different personalities. So by looking at the name she use to login, you can roughly judge how is her mood, and what topics she is interested to talk with. That's IMO quite convenient.

"But I do think building a strong online identity is an important strategy for distinguishing yourself in an increasingly online world. So choose carefully, and focus on those things that best represent you."

Or perhaps not. It worries me that people are more inclined to spend time developing their identity in this online world - whether through one site, or through many. The internet is a useful resource, and we have to be thankful for those souls who provide useful content. But the S/N ratio is so high and so many people are clamouring for their online audience.

The world would be a nicer place to live if people spent as much time developing their relationships with their neighbours, their local communities and their work colleagues as they do developing their online identities. If people were as concerned about their real relationships as they were with their online avatars...

"I struggle to write one lousy blog four to five times a week."

Nope, you struggle to write one thoughtful, interesting and relevant blog four to five times a week.

Your on-line identity is as simple or complex as you choose it to be. As others have said for many there is no single on-line identity. Each name you use or site you blog represents a either slightly different or majorly different part of your thinking.
I have 4 different sites that I blog and 5 different messenger names.
I choose to have 4 blog sites because I want to share specific points of view when I lbog and try to keep in the same neighborhood on each site.

@M Kenyon : centralized big databases are evil; single point of failure. With the abysmal security out there I don't want to make the job of an identity thief easier than it already is.

The "here, look at 30 sites I visit for my personal information" is silly, though. It's not like there's no overlap, and it looks sort of like a desperate "be my friend/talk to me, any way possible". A much better way is simply having your e-mail address there or some sort of contact form. There, centralized and solved.

The only thing I could think of to add besides that would be specifically for media, and you don't need a dozen of those; just pick the most convenient and your visitors will have to bend over.

There is still a lot of misconception regarding openID. Here are a couple links that helped me understand and adopt the technology.

http://lifehacker.com/software/technophilia/one-openid-to-rule-them-allor-not-302156.php
http://ilikeellipses.com/category/openid/

Anon said: >The world would be a nicer place to live if people spent as much time developing their relationships with their neighbours, their local communities and their work colleagues as they do developing their online identities. If people were as concerned about their real relationships as they were with their online avatars...

This is what concerns me. I have a blog related to my job. I am on facebook to keep up with my kids away at college. I'm part of ning, to participate in a work-related program. I have an IM screen name. I have several email accounts, so I'm online. But I have noticed that many people seem to be uncomfortable with personal interactions. I think it's lack of practice. If they can't alter the environment to their own personal requirements, (listen to their iPod with their own music instead of nasty elevator music, talk with people of their own age and interest group) they seem to become nervous and eager to physically leave the situation. This hurts "real" community building, IMO.

For many people, this may not be a problem. But I am also involved in volunteer groups that actually go out and help real people in their homes. Can't do it virtually, gotta have interaction skills. Real leaves need to be raked out of real yards. Real food needs to be taken to food pantries for real people to eat. I work in a community garden - real weeds have to be pulled from around tomato plants to get tomatoes.

Working on these projects with people builds strategy skills around accomplishing the tasks, diplomacy since everyone disagrees now and then, patience, because some people just require that. It appears to me that these skills are getting rusty with disuse and it scares me. We can't just go offline when things get hard in real life!

A Blog is an "Avatar" not the real identity.
You are actually making a logical error in trying to make the words and letters meaning the same as the actual representation you have about your self.

It isnt.
Its just an Avatar, a representatation of your own representation of you ;).

I totally understand you -- I struggle to READ it regularly, not even mention writing anything similar. But I never miss any part of it, even if I read it with delay (like this one for example) -- it's certainly NOT LOUSY.

You're doing a great job -- keep going! :-)

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I have 4 different sites that I blog and 5 different messenger names.
I choose to have 4 blog sites because I want to share specific points of view when I lbog and try to keep in the same neighborhood on each site.

I like having disparate identities. My work networks don't need to know about my gaming, and vice versa. I can present myself as I need to be for each situation, just as in real life.

On the other hand, I choose to rotate a list of website that I frequently update to (say 6 out of 10 only at any time), so if someday I feel tired/distracted and wish to disappear from the web for a while, I'd save the trouble of explaining... :P