Lifestreaming and the digital you

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One of the things that takes care of this – helping to collect a person’s digital conversations in one place – is social bridging.

This is the idea of allowing ‘social sites’ created by organisations to connect with popular ‘social destinations’ like Facebook and Twitter, enabling their community members to freely transport their identities, relationships and activities across the social web.

“For the consumer, social bridging allows for a better web experience, where they have more control of the flow of identity, relationship, and activity data they contribute to various sites,” explains Stephanie Himoff, vice president of european sales and business development at Pluck, an integrated social media solutions provider focusing heavily on this.

“No matter how well a user is established on Facebook, no matter how many comments on news articles they’ve submitted on their favourite publishing site, currently when they go to a new social site they are a total stranger whose previous activity means nothing,” she says.

Social bridging allows users to easily transport their identity across different social sites, ensuring that when they join a new site they bring their identity with them.

It also allows businesses to extract the maximum value out of their social media investments.

“There are millions of social sites online today and as long as these sites remain disparate, the passion and energy that organisations have worked hard to generate and sustain on their social sites will be confined to that site alone,” adds Himoff.

What about privacy?

Of course, social bridging and bringing all your digital conversations together in one place online has many benefits, but it also raises several questions around digital privacy.

Offline, it is relatively easy to keep the various aspects of your life apart.

“That’s a natural part of being human,” says Charman-Anderson. “We moderate our conversation based on who we’re talking to. Online these boundaries blur and problems occur when there is bleed from one silo to another.”

Sadly, some sites really don’t help users to understand the privacy implications of their actions, and with the number of social applications on the increase this problem isn’t going to go away anytime soon.

Some, like Posterous, enable users to set passwords limiting access to just those you want and are worth bearing in mind if you choose to start lifestreaming but don’t want the whole world to see.

Should you take the Allison approach and put it out there, just remember that the net is actually a very social place where anything and everything you post can be seen by anyone.

Think before you post or you may become a star for all the wrong reasons.

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