Well this post already has like 41,000 comments, but I just wanted to say you make a really great point. And when you talk about your friend at Google not wanting to dilute his professional searches with Myspace photos, it got me thinking. My cousin recently asked me to remove all my photos with him from my Flickr account – mostly from family occasions and memories of me and him having a great time in London/Amsterdam. I don't think I even have one picture of him holding a beer (!), but because an old coworker of his came across his photo online, he's worried about it. I despise the fact that in our culture, our professional "brand" in the workplace dictates how we live the rest of our lives.

An excellent post, Penelope, as usual. Understanding that each community has a different experience is something that everyone needs to assess before they join. One-size-fits-all messaging doesn't work in this game, and can hurt your personal (or corporate) brand.

I pose these questions not because I have answers to them or think they are true. This is simply a topic I struggle with and have only recently begun to explore. The way I see it, most of us are accessible 24/7 yet few of us are saving lives (and therefore don't need to be so accessible). There's little down/quiet time. We're all networked and branded online but face to face personal interactions are suffering.

I'm used to being the dissenting point of view and expect someone to defend his/her beloved social media. But before you respond walk down a lively city street and look at all the people walking together or having lunch yet ignoring the person in front of them in favor of a phone or PDA. Respect has all but gone out of the window, as has uninterrupted quality time with friends and family.

Typically we have control over our audience thanks to the whole spatio-temporal network of the "real world". Sally is in another city or Jimmy walked in a couple seconds too late. But when it comes to all our online media we lose much of that control over audience. Not only is it nice to be able to interact with the same person in different ways, professionally and socially, its also nice to be able to keep people separate. Which I suppose, over a slew of different privacy settings for each medium one might achieve a similar degree of control, but I think for the average user you are open and out there for any of your networked contacts. And thus, I see a motive for trying to be consistent or flat in character. How do we gauge the level of intimate progression with acquaintances to close friends to family in a potentially undifferentiated space such as the Google search results page?