Over a year and a half ago, I wrote about the difference between Facebook and the rest of the Internet.  The post was sparked by a conversation that I had with my wife about the content of this blog. Reflecting back on that post, most of what I said remains true to this day.  However, if I rewrote that post today, I would not use the term avatar as much.  What I was really talking about with my references to an avatar was the notion of having a public and a private persona.  My understanding of this has changed since the first post.

My private persona is the one that I share with friends and coworkers. With these people, I talk about my kids, my family and the everyday events in my personal life.  I mostly do this through Facebook.com on an infrequent basis.  However, my day to day private persona communications are done over the phone, through SMS messaging and through Instant messaging.  I'm probably in the 9% category of the 1/9/90 rule here, but I think that is a function of how I've always used the Internet which has mostly centered around communicating with people that don't know me personally.  Because of this, Facebook.com is hard for me to get used to.  Put it this way; when you interact anonymously or through an avatar, you rarely share personal details.  Facebook.com asks you to share that which is personal.  Having spent the last decade conditioning myself to the anonymous Internet, Facebook.com's usage pattern seems foreign to me.  Again, a matter of perspective because many of the friends that I have who have only known Facebook.com as a social networking site fall into the 1% category of the 1/9/90 rule. They issue status updates every twenty minutes and tell you intimate details about their lives.  That said, I believe that if I wasn't online long before Facebook.com appeared, that I would tend towards the 1% category.

My public persona, a.k.a. my avatar, used to be completely wrapped up in the alias Kressilac.  It no longer is this way and I blame some of that on Facebook.com and some of it on my Internet usage patterns changing.  I still play games and when I am playing games, you can find me online under the Kressilac alias.  My character's names are almost always Kressilac and my forum aliases are the same.  However, as the face of social networking evolved from listservs to forums to blogs to Facebook/Twitter, it became increasingly important to me to use Derek Licciardi when making public statements.  On game development and design blogs, I switched to Derek Licciardi almost exclusively.  My blog will eventually switch over to Derek Licciardi when I find the time to update the records in the database.  Twitter will stay @Kressilac simply because it is shorter than @DerekLicciardi though, I may change it over to @DerekLicciardi eventually.  Back in the listserv and early blog days, I used my Kressilac alias for everything I did online.  Today, that alias is increasingly being marginalized to my time playing games.
 
Looking back at my post, I would amend it to reflect three personas.  The first being a personal Derek Licciardi as used in SMS, Facebook.com and IM.  This is the private me.  It's the me that my family and friends get to see.  The second would be my public, perhaps professional, persona which is the one I use when interacting with formal online communities and blogs.  This is who I am on my blog and includes who I am on other game design blogs, Microsoft's Partner network and anytime an alias would confuse someone.  The third would be my game playing profile, Kressilac which I use for World of Warcraft, Xbox Live and other game services/communities.  I know this sounds like a whole lot of techno psychological babble, but in today's day and age, managing your online presence is becoming more and more important.  I believe that starts with getting an understanding of your own perspective on how you use the Internet.  You can't manage your online reputation unless you know what you're managing.