I love that in the name of keeping up on the latest in social technologies I get to play with it all: everything from signing up for a plethora of social networking tools (I’m on friendster, tribe, linked in, ryze, konnect, Wallop to name a few and I am thinking I need to join myspace); writing blogs (I’ve tried live journal, blogger, typepad, wordpress) playing with photo sites (I’ve tried at least two dozen), trying out social tagging sites (flickr, delicious, yahoo); organizing through social coordination and calendaring sites (meetup, upcoming, UPOC, dodgeball, a few others); IMing with all the various IM tools (IM, Yahoo, AOL), emails (I have MSN, yahoo, gmail accounts), immersing myself in various online communities, trying out online dating (I think one long afternoon mired in a usability study I tried out at least six). Add to that all the online gaming sites I’ve had to play around with, the more CSCW collaboration tools, and knowledge management systems…not to mention my home pages as they have evolved over time.
It’s, well, a little frightening to think of all the residual bits of Shelly that are out there. If some mastermind could integrate them all into one giant pool of Shelly I’d probably be very embarrassed at all the inconsistencies in my various online identities. Even so, the fact that I can spread myself across so many online social technologies indicates that its not that difficult to find different online venues to express distinct aspects of one’s life.
