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Comment by lusis | Hacker News Reader

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.

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This solves the problem only up to a point: How to group and filter among the hundreds of FB friends, some are family, some are colleagues, some are close friends, etc. FB has a mechanism to do lists, post filtering, etc, but I find it to be clunky so don't use it. The result is like you have all you acquaintances in one room, shout what you want to say, and people who are not interested will tune it out. Not ideal. But I can't think of a better alternative.

I think the answer in a post-FB/Twitter decentralized/distributed social network world is to have transient, easily spun-up and spun-down social networks that you could think of as places.

So, for work friends, I'd make (or join) a social network called WorkBuddies, and I'd have a different one for each context. But you'd take your identity with you, and you'd own your own canonical social graph independent of the people in each network.

I have also got the same problem within FB: Most of my friends don't care about tech/startups so I'm hesitant e.g. about commenting on Techcrunch.

Your approach sounds interesting, and it corresponds well with how you take on different personalities in different settings in real life.

Do you know of that is what Diaspora is trying to do?

I think they're doing something functionally similar, which is basically contact list management into groups. They call it "Aspects" iirc.

I think the problem with that is that it creates weirdly asynchronous or non-cohesive groups. I.e. if I have a list called work friends, it's not necessarily the same as your list called work friends, and the stuff I share to my list doesn't go to the same set of people.

In the "Places" paradigm, the groups would be more canonical and autonomous and transparent to the people in the group.

But my work friends aren't your work friends. Our friend circles might overlap but they aren't the exact same. So why should you be posting to my work friends group? Don't get me wrong - I think you have an interesting concept here, I'm just trying to understand it better. (I wrote Friendika, which is kind of like Diaspora but a bit more capable - I could probably make something like this happen.).

Well, if we don't work together, we wouldn't share a work friends group.

It's true that a places metaphor is a bit less granular, but I think it makes it easier to understand how things are being shared than a bunch of one to many connections that overlap to varying degrees.

Also, there's no reason you couldn't have both, since the places metaphor is really in practice just a subset of everyone having individual group lists.

Well in my case I have a rule. I don't friend anyone on facebook I've never met personally of that I'm currently working with. Everyone is pretty understanding about it.

I also use Facebook for personal and Twitter for work/code. I try to spill over a little of each so that my friends can see my work and my peers can see I'm a human. My blog has a mix of technical and personal, but lately it's mostly technical.

I think the author has a point, but I think it should be up to the user to be able to "subscribe" to different identities rather than having to choose which one you will post under. I think stuff like tags and categories will help with this. Until then, I'll just keep making noise, I think if it's signal to someone, it's worth it.

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