Comment by DanielKehoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielKehoe | Hacker News Reader

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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.

It's definitely a UI issue, in that right now the burden of management of multiple identities falls to users, and yes, developers don't usually include facilities to help. It's a pain, and like Wolfrom I sometimes choose to not say anything at all.

But beyond that, I think it's also a problem of expectations mismatch: on an app level social media is about siloing information by person (or possibly by company), but the user expectation is often that they've siloed information by subject matter.

It's a burden most acutely felt by so-called renaissance men and women (which I'd wager are an over-represented group here in the HN community). There's discrimination towards people that talk about/do seemingly unrelated things, that I think Wolfrom is alluding to. People tend to confuse specialization with expertise, e.g. that a software developer that also does visual design and has an interest in making music, for example, isn't as much of an "expert" as someone focused exclusively on code. Unfortunately not separating your content can have an impact on your credibility.

I struggle constantly with this problem. As I see it, the main practical problem is that services have a 1-to-1 mapping from identity to account. This is compounded by the fact that the services often depend on one another - e.g. when I need a unique email address to sign up for some service, then for every account I need on that service, I also have to go create yet another gmail account.

I wish I could have just one identity, that is me-facing, but many accounts, that are audience-facing. I wish I could log into YouTube as Andy Wood, and manage all my accounts (3D graphics demos, domino toppling, paragliding, etc).

In fact, WordPress.com works just like this, and I love it. Google, YouTube, and Twitter, by contrast, seem borderline resistant to this type of usage - meaning they all force me to keep creating new email accounts in addition to the multiple service accounts, even when I really don't want another email account.

One relatively easy solution for your email accounts problem: buy a domain, set up Google Apps, create a user and make that email address catch-all.

Now you can have as many email addresses as you want without needing to create them one by one. And if you work it a little more you can even answer as any of them and apply filters.

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