one satisfies your hardwired need to herd, the other to be an individual. no doubt the strength of each ebbs and flows in some natural rhythm.

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@graham: I’m struggling with finding the right balance of number of Twitter-friends. Too many, and Twitter becomes too noisy. Too few, and it’s like an empty room. I’m avoiding adding everyone I know online because that would just become too unwieldy to follow.

@rachel: good point. making sense doesn’t have to suck the soul out of it, but it feels like it’s hard to define why/how it works at the moment, so I’m cool with just going with it.

@jeffrey: overload is a definite risk. Ideally, we’d all be using OpenID or the like for a single identity across all services. I gave a presentation today, and was showing Flickr, del.icio.us, Google Docs and a couple others. I had to remember usernames and passwords on the fly. Very hard to do. There has to be a better way. As for how I handle overload, I’d guess only partially successfully. I don’t sit in front of the computer 24 hours a day, but it is often nearby, and I catch myself “checking in” more often than my wife would like. I’ll often just close the lid and force myself to ignore it all, though. It’s not like it goes anywhere…

@kiran: convergence is happening now – posting updates to twitter to notify of new blog posts, etc… I find that gets a bit too noisy, though. There’s a zen thing going on. Blogs want to be blog. Flickr wants to be Flickr. Twitter wants to tweet. Merging them all into a duct-taped hydra may make the experience more awkward than it needs to be. Or it might solve the identity problem. Not sure…

I am beginning to think more about the postmodern effects of information overload. When is enough enough or not enough? While I think the tools are getting better, there are also getting to be more of them doing even cooler things, which somehow leaves me here at 12:48 am with still more to do before I sleep. Ironically, the really like all this, though I have never felt so pulled in so many directions.

Is anybody else struggling with this? D’Arcy, how do you handle this?

However, it is my belief that eventually publishing and social networking will converge. After all, content sharing and publishing are no fun at all if there is no audience – or, in other words, if the “social” element intrinsic in them is non-existent.

And, how long will people juggle multiple sites, user_ids, passwords, media, etc. to “socially” share, publish, network,…without finding the “and constant feeling of needing to “be on” very tiring” (to quote Jeffrey Keefer).

Disclosure: I am the co-founder of Cylive (http://www.cylive.com) – a “social media publishing and content management” platform.

Strange how all this is starting to come together. Is Twitter glue for your personal community?

Like you I find that Twitter gives me a sense of being around people. Unlike an office, I get to actually pick the people I want to Twitter around, which I think is cool.