For a generally anti- social personality like myself, the  current social networking reality has me a bit stuck as to how to retain control of my online and offline persona. It takes multiple personality disorder to a whole other level, in managing our myriad of work and personal, family and friend networks. Trying to keep them distinct verges on the impossible, when even in real life, the lines aren’t that clear to begin with. And what about the whole private versus public visibility concern, let alone being able to determine who is a friend or a stranger.

As in everything that the internet touches, both good and bad, it makes the “worlds colliding”  feeling accelerate quickly into the unmanageable. I think that whatever we put on the internet is inherently public, but with so much content out there it used to be virtually trivial. However, with the increasing ubiquity of social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter, connecting web content to real life identities has become a bit too obvious.

Facebook does a decent job of controlling the visibility of personal content. But twitter by design does not. So in an effort to establish my social networking boundaries, I have made the first step of protecting my twitter updates. This has the primary effect of privatizing my tweets (through which I have started to announce different blog posts) so that I am not publicly visible on twitter, and thus shutting it down as a public conduit to my web content.

However, Facebook is not off the hook. After having lived on Facebook for a couple of years now, I am reviewing how I want to use it in managing my personal connections. I am moving towards being more conservative with the people that I connect with through Facebook. I also like the idea of keeping work connections on a separate site like LinkedIn, but it does take extra effort, which may be worthwhile once it is all setup.

This issue of social networking boundaries is an evolving one, and more than likely, this post will be irrelevant or at least outdated in the very near future. But, I just wanted to get my thoughts down so that it gets me to act on them, and gives me the opportunity to review them down the line.

P.S. In a further blurring of boundaries, I tried to integrate the comments on this blog with Facebook, but haven’t been able to get it to work, which may or not be a good thing.