There used to be a fairly simple rule for me. Facebook was for social social networking, and LinkedIn was for work social networking. I had realised that, whilst I tend to be a fairly open person at work, I needed to provide some sort of segmentation to my online personae if nothing else to be able to prevent photos from my more hedonistic days scuppering my increasingly middle-aged career plans.

There were some friends who made it on to my LinkedIn business contacts pages, and some colleagues who became friends and with whom I could explain why I was wearing that hat in 1996, whilst looking through the vomit-splattered photographic records of their own misspent youths.

I have found, however, that Twitter seems to be blurring the line for me. And I think there are a couple of reasons for that:

- the short message nature of Twitter means that most of what is on there (and certainly the conversations) mean little out of context. I think that, using the right language, one could have a quite private conversation without anyone else having the feintest idea what you were on about. This is a bit like the dinner party 'wink' conversation that Nicholas Negroponte talked about back in the day in Being Digital.

- the organisation that I now work for is substantially less 'formal' that the last two that I have worked in. And how nice it is to be back in the creative industries!

It took me a long while to realise that we all have a series of roles that we play as we go about our day to day business. Some jealously guard their out of work life, and I have sometimes found people in that category difficult to work with (I don't need to know your innermost thoughts, but a bit of broader context sure does help). Others wear their hearts on their sleeves, and that can also be a challenge.

Social networking in the Web 2.0 context leaves us with much of our lives rationalised down into text and pictures. These vignettes are of themselves only vague representations of 'real' world aspects of our lives. Will we all need to be a bit Max Clifford about managing our online personae going forward?

I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that Social Networking is the purest example so far of Marshall McLuhan’s statement about the medium being the message.

Social networking seems to offer the ability to use a consistent distribution mechanism (the Internet) to offer varying forms of media channel (the Web2.0 fashionable service du jour) where the underlying content becomes less and less relevant in comparison to the way in which the content is delivered.

This time two years ago, my then employer was setting up virtual spaces in Second Life. Second Life – remember that?

MySpace was the place for breaking new music. The Artic Monkeys are still around… kids aren’t so keen on MySpace now though…(Although being owned by Rupert Murdoch doesn’t exactly naturally imply youth credibility).

Facebook holds sway, until Twitter takes over…

…and in two years time, the whole shebang will have undoubtedly moved on again.

In the past, technology waves have seen an early peak from early adopters, which have then been followed by mass adoption. Similar trends seem to occur with Web2.0 and Social Networking services, except that maybe the Trough of Disillusionment is felt by all, and people then move on to the New new thing en masse.

Maybe that, or it’s only Meedja types in Soho and Hoxton that are really using any of this stuff anyway.

In the meantime, does any of the social networking impact or come close to “traditional” media like telephones? Phones are now but just another Web2.0 service delivered over an IP network (with the exception of the last mile)…

Why's this important? Well, to extend out from McLuhan, the message gets lost if the recipient doesn't know what medium you're sending it over. Communication breaks down even more if I expect to be Facebooked when you expect me to Tweet... Already organisations find challenges where teams do not have shared norms about what communications media should be used for what purpose. Web 2.0, with it's plethora of effectively new media runs the risk of causing even more strife as people struggle to understand how, let alone what, they should be communicating.

TFL has recently spent a great deal of money making improvements to the layout of the pavements at the bottom of my road.

What were cracked and shabby slabs and sheets of tarmac have now been split into a narrow, bricked pedestrian track, a neatly marked cycle lane and a broad expanse of top soil which either the local council has run out of money to plant, or is using as set-aside to be able to get some money from the EU. What has resulted is a very strange experience indeed...

When before the pavement was assigned as shared between pedestrians and cyclists, everyone looked out for each other, now cyclists whip past in their too-tight lycra and have a palpable sense of "I'm right, get out of my way." Any sense of communication between the two modes of transport has been lost through the over-detailed pavement markings. Honestly, are cyclists so stupid that they need to be told to Give Way when the cycle lane crosses a road? According to TFL, apparently yes (although Boris Johnson is in charge and he regularly cycles, so maybe they have a point...)

These pavements just now leave me feeling nervous and slightly cross... alternatives to the over-proscriptive approach (Shared Spaced) can be found out about here.

One sees this kind of impact happening in many companies... Being over controlling leads to people becoming less reliant on their own intelligence, and less willing to communicate with each other. This is what also can happen when organisations become over-controlling through their systems and processes. Communication breaks down as "the computer says no". People unable to interact other than through the proscribed forms and defined workflows...

Interesting article from Euan Semple about the reaction of a (non-)participant at a recent workshop.

Maybe what he was observing was a terrible symptom of our modern world...

..there again, it might just have been someone terrified of talking in workshop groups.

I spent a couple of years running management development workshops, and I vividly remember a conversation with a friend of mine shortly after I got the job.

C was working as a press officer for the Beeb at the time, and was aghast at my new role.

"The thing is Matt", she said, "I go on all these training courses and spend the entire time petrified that the trainer will point me out and say 'So what do you think, C?'"

It was a big lesson for me. The week before she'd been out interviewing Sir David Attenborough, a scenario that would have left me terrified. But for her, the idea of talking in front of a group left her scared witless - something that those of us who thrive on performing in groups can quite easily forget.

Lots of coverage about Chris Anderson's new book Free, which have triggered a few thoughts. Should be noted that I haven't read it yet, and won't be doing so unless someone gives me a copy. (That's not a point of principal, more that I thought The Long Tail was an overly strung-out magazine article).

'Free' makes it difficult for people to associate a value to things...

The basics of a lot of modern life is the value that a price puts onto things. Why does an Audi cost more than a VW which costs more than a Skoda? Primarily because people are willing to pay the difference.

If you put a price tag of zero onto a commodity, then many people can struggle to see what it is worth to them. I guess that this is a possible challenge for the freemium model that is emerging today... I quite like Spotify, but not enough to pay a tenner a month. If I had had to have paid a fiver to get access then I might be liking it a lot more than I do today.

The value of low latency...
Something I haven't seen coverage of in Free is the varying value that the same piece of information can have depending on when it is received.

I used to work for Reuters, and much of their business is still based around delivering lots of information very quickly indeed. The prices of stocks, shares, currencies and commodities is fairly easy to get a hold of, but companies are willing to pay big premiums for reducing delay by milliseconds.

In the consumer world, there are similar examples... It could be argued that Murdoch made his inroads into the UK TV market through punters' willingness to pay for live football, and TV soaps still regularly create 'must see' moments that defy the current fashion for delivering TV on demand at a time that suits the viewer.

Free makes sense if it is someone else's content...

An interesting comment picked up in a Wired UK article about how Murdoch is now trying to introduce charging for content. All these companies trying to develop what are effectively new channels would say that stuff should be given away for free, wouldn't they?

Commitment to providing a service...

If I sign up to the free part of a freemium service, it feels like a very one-way contract. What sort of commitment does the supplier make to me as a consumer? The answer, generally, is nowt until I start paying...

This supplier-biased contract, however, can filter through heavily into even the "premium" services. A criticism of the Google model for applications (Google Apps, etc) is whilst the technology is strong, the supporting services (customer service, account management, support) are not particularly well conceived at present. For the individual, this might not be an issue. For corporates, it will be.