Integrating my various “lives” – online and offline – is something that apparently is very important to me. I say apparently because sometimes I try to keep them separate and it just causes stress, annoyance and disinterest. In many ways, I am and want to be, an open book. For example, all my Vancouver blogger friends know that I just became a grandmother for the second time and my twitter pals know that I just had a wedding anniversary. On my other blog, Change Therapy, I talk freely about a lot of things – sexuality, religion, etc.
Mind you, that’s just my way of doing it. For some people, keeping the different aspects of their lives separate is important, works well, and is even enjoyable. There are all kinds of people who, for example, get a lot out of anonymous blogging; and I’m not talking about blog scrapers, trolls and porn bloggers here – just people who have chosen to stay anonymous, like Waiter Rant, Patient Anonymous or Going Private.
(Sidebar: Even whether one decides be highly transparent and integrated or private and compartmentalized, is a decision that’s influenced – maybe even determined – by one’s personal background, experience and personality type. Which explains why one does not have to be an extrovert to be transparent, or an introvert to be more private; such decisions come informed by many of the mind’s strands).
Carol, in her last post, was talking about integrating one’s online persona. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a way that really works for me. In terms of pulling all the information together, of the ones I use, MyBlogLog and Facebook are probably the most comprehensive. But I really, really don’t like their layout; if I use such a social media tool it needs to look and feel comfortable; it needs to be a bit of a living room. Both Facebook and MyBlogLog have a bit of a mall feeling and I guess I’m of a generation and persuasion that doesn’t find malls particularly inviting.
I know there are many more such tools out there but I feel very unmotivated to try them out because so far, all of them have me disappointed (with a possible, very lukewarm exception of FriendFeed). Ideally, I’d like to see something that is
- comprehensive in terms of pulling together all my online presences (and actually does it; Tumblr, for example, promises to pull in my Twitter feed but doesn’t)
- easy to use
- responsive
- relatively hacker-safe
- fast (how much of a time delay would i put up with? 5 minutes maybe?)
and has
- clean layout that I can easily change
- tagging ability
- the ability to post extra material, ideally all the way from text to video (a la Tumblr, which, by the way, I kind of like – but see above)
- an FAQ that talks about more than just the very obvious
- easy, friendly and time-sensitive help (please NONE of that farmed-out help, for example like the one on Twitter; I really like the model that Dreamhost uses for support)
- ideally, the sort of follower-sorting that TweetDeck has
- public/private settings
- favouriting
- whatever back-end structure that’s needed to keep the thing working a good 90%+ of the time
Is there something like that out there? And would I/you want to pay for it? How much? Would it be okay to have advertising on it?
Or, here’s an idea. I was just wondering what the “meatspace” equivalence of such an online space would be. A sort of plaza, perhaps, or a park. It’s infrastructure.
What if governments started building such sorts of infrastructure?
Or should it be more like Wikipedia?
Enough questions for now?
Image by mike (el madrileño)