Here are my personal rules for managing my online presence.
1. Blog www.umbreen.com
Who it’s for: Primarily an outlet for the jabber in my head, the intended audience is those who know me and/or like me. Also sometimes used as a tool to archive experiences had / shared. I initially started the blog because I wanted to grab the domain before the other ‘Umbreen’ ( who also happens to spells her name with a “U” and grabbed the umbreen @ gmail.com address before me) got it to. (You know who you are. :P ) Also mostly the blog is a fun way to experiment with plugins/messing around with style-sheets and other general experimentation.
Who can connect: It is open to the world-wide audience (obviously). I recently, connected the blog RSS feed with hootsuite that publishes to both my twitter, linkedin and facebook accounts so the blog is more integrated with my other online footprints now, but originally it was pretty much in isolation which is hope I pretty much want it. On rare occasion, I will post pictures of ‘me’ on my blog, but in general I don’t post pictures of friends and family (since I don’t know if they want that kind of visibility).
2. Facebook www.facebook.com/umbreen –> Yes I got the vanity URL. :)
Who it’s for: Facebook is where I post everything about my that I want to ‘share’, which largely means pictures while traveling and random pictures from my phone. (Since I got the HTC Desire, a lot more random pictures from my phone). There is a lot of intersection between old work people, random people, general acquaintances, close and distant family and actual friends so I generally do not post anything on facebook that is truly personal. (Also admittedly, I can be a secretive person about actual personal stuff).
Who can connect: I only ‘friend’ people if I have actually met them in real-life and had a conversation with them.
3. LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/umbreen
What it’s for: A way to develop and maintain my professional network exclusively, but I have connected my facebook, twitter and blog so that it appears in the LinkedIn status updates. I kind of struggle with this, since it means having to ‘self-censor’ because of that. (This issue is eloquently illustrated by Paul Adam of Facebook. I hope they are coming up with a master plan.)
Who can connect: Unless I’m in decision overload mode and click ‘accept all’ (or ‘reject all’ depending on my mood), my rule for connecting with someone is that I have to actually have worked with you in some capacity and had a one to one conversation.
4. Twitter www.twitter.com/umbreen
I only use to to post ‘status updates’ which are connected to FB, LinkedIn etc.
5. Picassa
What it’s for: Plan to use it as a ‘cloud photo storage’. Soon I’m going to buy like 40GB of space of Picassa and upload all the photos on my computer there. (i.e. Sync to web album) which will then be my online backup for all photos. I already removed iPhoto from my mac and move all the albums / libraries to Picassa because a. iPhoto sucks. b. why would I pay for an upgrade for features (face recognition, geotagging) that I can get for free? All my Picasa albums are going to remain private unless I’m trying to share my pictures with someone so they can download/store them.
6. Empire Avenue
I still don’t get the point of this and think its a passing fad. In the meanwhile my ‘stock ticker’ is “UT”, my current share price is currently 15.56eves and total network is 7,477eves.
7. FourSquare
I think I actively tried to ‘check-in’ to places for like 3 days when I first got my phone. After that, got bored. I’m try to optimize my life for value-add activities and this does not cut it. You can however, still find my by searching for ‘Umbreen’.