Kate Ho presented one of the sessions at Barcamp Scotland on Saturday about this. I think that she’d perhaps intended it to be a ‘how’ session, about the tools and the mechanics we are going to need if we are goingto survive the overhead of maintaining and feeding (Kate raised an interesting point about differing communication patterns associated with different SNS – so simply funneling your twitterfeed into your FB status updates may not create an FB-appropriate voice for you) all our various SNS profiles.
However, she didn’t quite get the opportunity, as the discussion seem to spiral away somewhat into ‘why bother?’-land, where some of the participants seemed pretty much happy to ‘just be who they are’ everywhere online – though to be sure other participants were kind of anxious about it all.
Personally, I wonder whether being quite that blithe about how you come across to the different groups in your social and work life is a wee bit naive. What about social situations where things like tact and discretion are needed, for example? I found myself wondering whether it’s something about the stage in life where you enter into the sort of commitments that you are most unwilling to walk away from, that make the difference – in the sense that these ‘fixed’ commitments then just have to be lived with, and manouevred in relation to one another?
As a bit of a greybeard vis-a-vis most of the barcamp participants, I found myself wondering whether it was an age-related thing, so I was amused to come across Identity Woman (I hope she won’t mind me giving her real name (I think!) 
) as Kaliya Hamlin – I do so as a sign of respect for what she writes) musing about the same sort of thing, after a session on Privacy at SXSW, and during one on Openness and FB, which had involved lots of (young male) FB developers.
I read ’somewhere’ (google search skills where are you now?) that SNS were ‘autistic’ about this aspect of human relationships. When naivety about these seems to exist in the FB developer community, then the rest of us should be alert to risk, perhaps?
