We'll see | Matt Zimmerman

I’ve been working to better organize my online social network so as to make it more useful to me and to the people I know.

I use each social networking tool in a different way, and tailor the content and my connections accordingly. I don’t connect with all of the same people everywhere. I am particularly annoyed by social networks which abuse the word “friend” to mean something wholly different than it means in the rest of society. If I’m not someone’s “friend” on a certain website, it doesn’t mean that I don’t like them. It just means that the information I exchange with them fits better somewhere else.

Here is the arrangement I’ve ended up with:

• If you just want to hear bits and pieces about what I’m up to, you can follow me on identi.ca, Twitter or FriendFeed. My identi.ca and Twitter feeds have the same content, though I check @-replies on identi.ca more often.
• If you’re interested in the topics I write about in more detail, you can subscribe to my blog.
• If you want to follow what I’m reading online, you can subscribe to my Google Reader feed.
• If (and only if) we’ve worked together (i.e. we have worked cooperatively on a project, team, problem, workshop, class, etc.), then I’d like to connect with you on LinkedIn. LinkedIn also syndicates my blog and Twitter.
• If you know me “in real life” and want to share your Facebook content with me, you can connect with me on Facebook. I try to limit this to a manageable number of connections, and will periodically drop connections where the content is not of much interest to me so that my feed remains useful. Don’t take it personally (see the start of this post). Virtually everything I post on my Facebook account is just syndicated from other public sources above anyway. I no longer publish any personal content to Facebook due to their bizarre policies around this.