Which me are you trying to reach?
	Posted by James Young at May 19, 2008 01:14 PM CDT Categories: Constituent Empowerment , Social Media

I thought I saw a quote somewhere that said “Web 2.0 is the personal Internet.” If I did indeed read this, as opposed to making it up myself (unlikely), then I have a question for the author. Which me is the internet for?

See, there are many versions of me. There is the me who likes soccer so much he “works from home” on the days the Champions League games are televised. There is also the me had a mullet in high school ages ago. And the me who writes short stories and shares them online with a writer’s group. And, of course, the me who works with Convio’s clients to understand and build better constituent empowerment tools.

That’s a lot of James Youngs, and they are pretty different from each other. It’s a little like the resume. The resume I write for one job will describe my experience differently from the resume I write for another job. We’ve all done that, right? Why? Because, just like every job has a different set of hiring criteria, not everybody who know one version of me is even remotely interested in knowing the other versions.

Or at least I think that based on my impression of the versions of “them” that the version of me interacts with. Confusing, right?

The power of the social media tools today is both awesome in its ability to let us share ourselves online, and at the same time horrible because of the effort involved in that sharing. There has been a lot of talk lately about this issue, using various words: Portability, Granularity and the opposite, Centralization

The gist of all the talk is that there needs to be a way to easily curate the presentation of yourself, in whatever setting you happen to be. In order to do this well, you need to have several things:

1. All of your data. This is where Data Portability comes into play, with tools like FriendConnect, Data Availability, and Facebook Connect . How can I choose which me to present unless I have all of them available?
2. The tools to construct, or curate, the me I want to present. Facebook tries to allow this with their Friend’s Lists and related privacy settings. I don’t know of any all encompassing tools that are also portable.

I realize I’m not providing a lot of answers here, because I don’t know if the answers exist yet. The collective technology community seems to be building things that raise more questions than provide answers. One thing I do know, the tools that give me the ability to curate myself in the many places across the web will need to be flexible, because just as there are many versions of myself, the versions change all of the time. As Thomas Vander Wal points out, we all have many interests, and our interests bring us into contact with other people who share those interests, but only some of them! The picture below is from Thomas’ excellent presentation on the subject.

And, our interests ebb and flow at any given time, so the importance of the other person sharing that interests also ebbs and flows.  An exchange about how great Liverpool is may be very engaging one week, but the next week the steady stream of Liverpool chat is just annoying. I’ll need to be able to constantly adjust the “volume” of interactions on any particular version of myself with ease, or else I just won’t participate.

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