Thursday 13 May 2010

WEB101 - Learning Portfolio, Week 11 - Social Me(dia) Rivers

This week we went a bit further on the whole web presence concept and examined ways that we could shape our online identities. One of the things we were asked to look at was FriendFeed. Now, for some reason I've always had a complete mental block when it comes to things like FriendFeed - they make me really uncomfortable. This week's lecture and reading forced me to think about exactly why. Initially when I got into Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, etc. I thought it was really cool (from a technical perspective, mostly) to link everything up and have Twitter comments showing on Facebook, etc., so I madly linked whenever I was prompted. But during this course I've thought a lot more about the image that I've started to present online (after years of doing my very best to be completely anonymous) and I've realised that I have several very different audiences based around several different social networking apps, and what I display to each of them is carefully considered and mostly relevant to that group. So particularly over the last few weeks of web presence work, I've mostly undone the permissions/connections between apps that I'd previously authorised, and done things like splitting out my Twitter accounts, because at the end of the day I don't want to bore my mostly non-technical friends with geekspeak, and I don't need my professional or school worlds to know details of the latest funny thing my 3yo has done.

I can appreciate how something like FriendFeed can help to define your own footprint, rather than somebody else doing it for you perhaps in a way you don't like. It's a way of presenting your very own RSS feed of yourself to the world. I just think that unless you're very one-dimensional, that you could end up presenting a multi-dimensional view of yourself to the entire online world, with dimensions that perhaps not everybody needs to see or know about.

So, I created the account and added a couple of feeds to it. But I've set it to protected, and for now I don't really want to use it. If nothing else, I guess I've "reserved" my chosen username to stop anybody else getting it! My conclusion - still haven't changed my mind, still uncomfortable with it. I'm glad now I can put it into words though!
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