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  Faceting Social Identity? It’s All About the Audience

  What’s all this noise about facets of social identity? Lifestreaming and Social Networking sites are moving us away from a single web application as The Network. Instead we are gluing together various networks through feeds and APIs. When authoring content, we use a combination of tools which are each optimized for the task at hand. When we are reading updates from our friends, we want to do some through as few channels as possible. This often starts with an aggregator, such as a FeedReader or Lifestreaming service which creates a single page out of all of the relevant new cool stuff people have been creating or doing. This is a step backwards for the people trying to following your flow. Traditionally when one used forum software, the audience is baked in:

  The forum allows one to assume people on that site are from your tribe The specific topic you are creating or replying to further limits the audience to only interested parties

  In this way, posting on a forum makes your current social identity implicit. When you post to “Best Big Mouth Bass Holes in Maine”, you’ve donned your Fisherman’s cap. With Lifestreaming, we lose this baked in identity/audience/channel. If I take an RSS feed for this fishing thread and pull it into my friendfeed account, the context is collapsed and I am exposing everyone in my friendfeed network to fishing tips. If we are lucky both the lifestreaming application and the forum posting software have a tagging or category system which the reader can use to filter down relevant posts, but often we are S.O.L. It seems socially responsible to acknowledge your audience and to pre-filter content for their benefit. This is what I mean by faceting ones social identity. We see these techniques put to good use in blogging software so that an author can cultivate a conversation on many topics on the same blog by using filtering (tags or categories). Would a general web service which is tool agnostic, be a useful enhancement to our digital identities?

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  • oface social facet identity audience