Are we prismatic or black and white?
I haven’t been overly impressed with ReadWriteWeb lately, but sometimes they put out an interesting article. This article by 4-Chan’s creator Chris Poole struck a cord with me. His basic premise is that almost all the current popular social sites are an all or nothing way to present yourself. People are multidimenisonal and most of the services don’t allow you to convey that. I think he’s onto something here.
I’ve always had a hard time getting into the social network sites. I normally have spurts of activity then retreat away from them again. I like to view, but not really to contribute. Part of that may be my personality, but normally I just don’t feel that everyone I’m friends with is interested in what I have to say/share, so I don’t post anything at all. I thought Google+ would solve some of that, but instead it works in the opposite direction. I can choose how I want to share things with, but those lists are created by me. I don’t want to have to be the person that deals with it.
I want to be able to share things as Charles the geek, Charles the photographer, Charles the book reader, Charles the <whatever interest occupies at the moment>. None of the services allow me to do that. Strangely, the one he likes most, is the one I’m most active on. Twitter. I rarely use or check my two main accounts. There is just too much traffic, but that’s another issue. I have something like six other active accounts that get updated on a regular basis, but each has it’s theme. Not many followers, but I don’t have to worry about if they are following because it’s me, rather than what I post. No, I’m not going to list them.
The answer for this is probably creating seperate blogs with their own accounts on other services as I deem neccessary, but it just seems like too much work to setup. Maybe I should look back at Posterous to handle this type of thing for me.
