Just yesterday, I created my third del.icio.us account (a social bookmarking service) and wondered again if I should speculate aloud on my blog about what kind of split personality syndrome this indicated.
I maintain several del.icio.us personalities for what I imagine are very good reasons: I automatically post links from del.icio.us to this blog, so I needed to start filtering, or else clutter up my blog with silly posts that had a single, badly annotated link. So I created a junk del.icio.us, that is filled with most of my random discoveries, that I try to look at and filter occasionally, letting the cream rise to the top, the “top” being my main account, which is automatically published here. The only tag I use in this junk account is one that flags it to my main account. The third del.icio.us account I have just started for my other blog, curating.info, because I realised I might like to keep a set of links on the subject of contemporary art curating, and use the tags to be extremely focused in how I file them.
Chris Heathcote feels my pain! … and he describes the plight of people managing multiple identities around the inta’net in a way that I couldn’t have said better myself. He speaks of this utopia, that has this feature, “seamless user switching”… that I wish was closer to today than tomorrow. He also makes the very good point that these separate accounts are not just about work/life divides, but are about more subtle things, which is absolutely clear, at least to me. All I have to say to his post is – Amen! I need it to be easier to move between different scenarios with different needs. Until then it’s pain in the neck 2.0.
4 replies on “Amen”
A related niggle is that of managing several different types of account which overlap. To which do you give priority? For example, I’ve got a blog, a del.icio.us account and a YouTube account (no Flickr yet, but I’m pondering). If I see something interesting on YouTube, I sometime ‘add to my favourites’ there, and sometimes I add it as a del.icio.us link. Occasionally I might embed the link in a blog post.
Rarely, however, will I duplicate the effort and save it as a YouTube favourite and a del.icio.us link, say.
Perhaps Web 3.0 will allow bookmarking and tagging in one type of account to automatically add the same link to other types of account?
Reagrding your del.icio.us woes, your problem there is just to do with the limited ‘post to your blog’ service that del.icio.us offers. What they need are two wee features: one which allows you to set which tag or tags are published; and one which allows you to set the frequency with which the publishing occurs. I’m sure they’ll come online soon.
I think you may have more foresight than you think. I heard last week that del.icio.us has a ceiling of 5000 bookmarks.
hi Rob – it’s true, it might simply be that the del.icio.us features for posting to blogs is limited, rather than the service itself. an interesting question.
Joanna – (we need to Skype) – and whoa – I didn’t know – if that is true, some users will hit that limit very soon…. and multiple accounts will be a matter of archiving for some users.
Ah, I see that ‘Skype’ is now a verb…