I knew Jamie had looked at my blog before he got in touch with me, and, rather nervously, I asked his opinion about it. As I was doing so I realised that this was the first time I’d asked anyone for feedback on my online persona, which is crazy if you think about it; I pretty much live online these days, and while a lot of my clients don’t know about or aren’t interested in my online persona, increasingly I’m aware that the boundary between my social and business presence on the web is blurring.

Hitherto, I’ve been very nervous of these two worlds colliding. I tend to blog about how I’m feeling, and worry that this is just tmi for potential business partners. Jamie disagreed. He thought my blog was interesting, but was frustrated that it was difficult to find out from it what my work actually involved.

I get a lot of unsolicited feedback on my blog, in the comments, on Twitter, and in person, and I’ve been surprised at how positive it generally is. I’m beginning to think I’ve been a bit cowardly for assuming that I’ll never work again if potential employers find out I’m an actual human being, so I’ve decided to conduct an experiment. As of today, I’ve brought together pretty much my entire online persona into one space. On my blog I’ve linked to my business website, linkedin profile, Facebook, Twitter and last.fm profiles on my About page and in the right hand sidebar. On my Google profile I’ve added my full name and linked again to all these sites.

It remains to be seen how this will affect my blogging. Perhaps my inner censor will filter out overly personal content, but I’ll try and suppress the urge. In any case, I’ve never blogged about very private matters, and I’d certainly never identify or openly criticise a client or an employer online.

I’m curious, though, about how other people are managing to negotiate this increasingly interconnected world we live in. Do you keep your private life for meatspace only? Or are you baring your soul online?

I think in part it is to do with the conflict between the professional and private personas that people display online. My favourite Twitter friends are those who tweet about their lives, their feelings, their boyfriend troubles, their everyday traumas and amusements. But a large proportion of the people I follow are there partly or mainly for business, and can’t risk exposing themselves in that way. In fact, since I’ve started to meet other users at real life events, and some of those users have enquired as to what I do and requested my business card in order to put me in touch with potential clients, I’ve felt too constrained to really use Twitter to express myself, as I felt able to do a few months ago.

I’m not complaining. One of the things that I liked about Twitter in the beginning was that I ended up carrying many of my online conversations into meat space, partly because of my involvement in Twestival, but also because of other ad hoc arrangements, like the wonderful Edinburgh Social Media Coffee Morning, pub quizzes, tweet ups and dinners. I still think Twitter is a good way of meeting people. The enthusiasm for tweet ups hints at people’s desire to form real connections in an environment where they don’t feel constrained. All of the professional tweeters I’ve met have been a great deal more interesting in real life than they’ve allowed themselves to be online.

Another unpleasant new trend I’ve noticed recently is for users to form small cliques that endlessly ass kiss each other. One of Twitter’s early strengths was as a recommendation tool, but such recommendations only carry weight if they are done genuinely and sufficiently infrequently so as not to alienate other users. Follow Friday is a good example of this. At the beginning users were recommending quite interesting people to follow. Now they seem to be recommending people they feel they ought to. There is also a rather sickening trend towards false positivity. I think people feel unable to express a negative sentiment in case it reflects badly on them. As a result there are lot of people who project an image of being constantly on the verge of orgasmic bliss. I find these twitterers as irritating as I do those who constantly whinge.

To my mind, Twitter is echoing the trajectory of Blogger back in the early noughties (ironic given Evan Williams’ involvement in both). I had a Blogger blog back in 2002 and found it a good way to start conversations with people. There was a lot of random traffic, and people commented regularly on each other’s blogs. Today, even established bloggers note the dearth of traffic and commentary on their blogs. People still read blogs, but they’ve stopped commenting on them, and something similar is happening with Twitter. People are tweeting more but responding less, as Twitter becomes a platform for displaying your business credentials or personal agenda. This has had the twin effect of making me feel like I’m ‘showing off’ when I tweet, and that my followers are ‘spying’ on me, rather than engaging with what I say or telling me something real about themselves.

I’m not quite at the point of closing my account, but I think it’s safe to say my love affair with Twitter is over. I’ll watch its progress with interest, while keeping my eye out for smaller, newer, more interesting social media platforms.