Thanks for sharing your strategies for coping with the wild and woolly world of web 2.0.

David is right that as the tools improve, we have more ways of maintaining specified zones of privacy (should we wish them) without facing the binary choice of opting in or opting out. We just need to exercise these choices as appropriate given our changing lives.

Curtis is also right that ultimately it is up to each individual to ensure that their web presence is accurate and intentional, rather than misleading and haphazard. In this era of personal branding, we really can’t leave to chance something as powerful and pervasive as an online persona.

- Mary

Great post. This is a subject I’ve gone back and forth with for quite a while and I have ended up more or less where David Mullen has. Facebook is private and limited to personal contacts, while I’ll accept an invite from anyone I know on LinkedIn. As a member of Gen-Y I think I must be an outlier here, but I do know quite a few folks in my same situation that have made the same call for the same reasons. We just don’t want to give someone the opportunity to form in their mind an inaccurate negative representation of who we are based on fragmented information, some of which we have no control over.

Because my online public persona is available for the entire world to see, I imagine it is just like my desk at work – anyone who walks by can see it so it’s my responsibility to make sure any personal items that are there are appropriate. At work, a friend from college can’t walk by your desk and pinup a photo of you doing a keg-stand, but if your Facebook profile is public or you have mixed contacts, if you’re tagged in that photo by a friend it has the same net effect. Not good.

So if Boomers were taught that good fences make good neighbors, I must be remembering my parent’s advice, better safe than sorry!

Curtis

As you noted, this is something I struggled with and put up a pretty big fence around my facebook profile. But I saw more and more bloggers inviting professional contacts to “friend” them on FB. That’s what led to my original post.

In a post this past Monday, I shared that I’ve decided to lower the fence around FB. I mention an experience in that post that reminded me that there’s power in being connected across many social networks and the ability to bring people together using said contacts.

I did, of course, update all my privacy settings and created separate groups that I funnel “friends” into based on how I know them. And based on which group you’re in, you may not see something – say the family photos from the beac – that my “friends” group can see.

Thanks for linking over to my space and referencing the original post.