People are naturally going to make their digital experiences mirror their real-life ones. That means there will be different kinds of people in different places. There is the you that your friends know. There is the you that your family knows. There is the you that your boss knows.

While every persona is you, the image you present is very different. Being human allows you to be a very detailed oriented person at work, but at home you can be messy with no judgment. It allows you to party on the weekends and on Tuesday give a presentation to a client that values your skills.

The separation is natural, it allows people to express themselves the fullest in each context.  The growth of successful social networks and community applications are proof of that. The variety of message boards around niche content allow people to socialize under nicknames about areas that they are passionate about. Facebook connected a generation of college students who couldn’t live without being in the know. LinkedIn created the perfect online resume and business networking application. Digg created a network of people who couldn’t stop sharing the latest/greatest thing they found on the Internet. RSS feeds allowed people to create a following of the ideas they wrote on their blogs.

Personal Networks, Content Networks, and their Subsets

Each application tapped into a different network. There are personal networks and there are content networks.  Both have subsets.  For example a personal network includes your family, friends, and co-workers.  Content networks can be anything from the people you follow on Twitter to the feed you receive from CNN.  Successful websites thrived when they focused on a subset and served its needs.

When sites reached a saturation point, many choose to expand their reach. Facebook grew from colleges to high schools, then to the general public. Some add features to draw in new users: Digg added a profile and LinkedIn added status updates. Each of these additions added new users and provided more engagement options. Unfortunately, by adding new users, sites started to bridge the gap between networks. Soon parents were on the same networks as kids. Managers on the same networks as employees. People started to change.

Collision Forces People to Retract

As soon as contexts collided, people started to react. Photos get untagged. Biographies become less candid. Complex permission models come to existence. People Google themselves to make sure their digital identity is something that their current employer is okay with.  It starts to become an effort for users, people, to manage.

Social networking sites need to focus on ways to reduce collisions if they want people to express themselves fully. They should either choose to focus on their current subset and forgo expansion. Or they should create a permissions model that clearly draws the lines between social groups. By restricting options and reducing complexity, people will use your product confidently.

Twitter gives me two options: anyone can see my updates or only chosen people. Digg lets people chose a nickname which can be totally different than my real name. People will use your products the way they live their life. They will separate their personas and keep them that way. If you try to bring two personas together, think carefully about how your users will react.  Sometimes it makes sense when it creates a bustling community and sometimes it doesn’t when it causes people to withdraw.