My Social Graph

I’ve been really thinking about my online profile and the links I have. It’s intriguing to play with the Google Social Graph API even though it’s only useful if you’re trying to build a social app (which – well – everyone is).

I’ve also looked at lots of tips on blogging, especially a recent post from Chris Brogan on Ten Secrets to Better Blogging. I’ve only just started blogging recently, but I know I’m being a little haphazard about it.  I’m probably not even following it for this blog.

I’ve also been looking into my social networks and who I follow and who follows me. I love social networks and I love interacting with them. Twitter and Friendfeed are where I get a lot of information from. The thing is for some reason I constantly feel under pressure to make a difference to people’s lives through my interaction.  Twitter is slightly different, but… why can’t I just be me?  Am I being me or not?

Friending is a currency

Links were the currency of the early noughties, and now friending has become the major currency we’re all trying to achieve.  Things like XFN and microformats have sprung up to help us connect with each other and Google is obliging so that we can get at that information. So, now it’s not just the HTML links we have pointing to our content, it’s also the virtual connections between me and somebody that we have on the web that matters.

So, it’s becoming all about getting “as many friends as possible”.  Having 100,000 friends on MySpace wasn’t (and still isn’t) impossible, but calling them friends is quite blatantly wrong – at least, if you’re primary use of the web is as a businessman.  It smacks more of a marketing strategy and something (shock horror) viral and insipid than of a social network.

Being in Business

Being in business, I am attempting to make money (doesn’t have to be a lot, just enough). In some ways, I find that it’s odd mixing my online business activities and the idea of “friending” with my business. It makes it all the more personal, and less about business.

In some ways, my online profile is me and it’s separate from my business. That separation is blurred now, with LinkedIn and others who force me to portray myself in terms of business.  Facebook is different in that it allows me to be me and gives me a semblance of control over who and what people see of me, and it’s much more personal.

The funny thing is that the people that make a lot of money out of the social networks are the network owners, the people who run the things.  Now, in an equivalent of a dot-com boomtime, we’re in a social-network boomtime, where the VC money is going into things that are about “building communities” around a topic.

Who Am I?

So I come back to my original question. Who am I? Am I the businessman on LinkedIn or am I the friendly guy on Facebook?  Am I the stream of random thoughts on Twitter or am I the stream of life information on Friendfeed.

One things for sure, I don’t think any of these things mean that anybody else can truly know who I am.  The funny thing is, I’m not sure that I always know either.  Maybe the interactions on social networks are part of what shape me?

What do you think?