Are you familiar with Ping.fm?  It’s a service that allows you to update all your social networks with one click of a mouse.  I thought this was a brilliant idea when I signed up a year ago, but it’s becoming more evident each day that my “lifestream” is molded differently for every social network I belong to.  Occasionally there’s a smidgen of overlap, but I’m typically writing to very different audiences.

For instance, I don’t think my co-workers on LinkedIn need to read about parties I attend and post about on Facebook.  To a similar fashion, my Facebookean friends likely don’t care about what I find intriguing about new trends in the online landscape or what I’m diving into at work.

Throw Twitter into the mix and I’m getting bogged down in massive customization of status updates.  I have one personal twitter account and three business related twitter accounts for the sites I handle.  While Facebook friends probably hear much of what I post to my personal Twitter account, I always phrase things differently.  Not due to the size restriction, but rather catered to the people that follow me.  The exchange of ideas is much more of a rapid-fire experience on Twitter than it is on Facebook.

The only use I can see for Ping.fm is a Facebook / Myspace crossover, but Myspace is nothing more than a glorified landing page for me.  I’m down to communicating with 1 person on Myspace and it’s barely worth checking anymore.

Getting back to customizing my status updates for the sake of certain audiences, it’s even more prevalent when I’m punching keys out to type up a new blog post.  I love having my own web address using my name, but it comes at an expense at the amount of truth that I can share in this space.  It’s the potential audience that I have to be concerned about.  It’s personal branding on the very smallest of scales.  It makes me second guess diving into controversial subjects like politics, religion or anything of the like.

So is that necessarily a bad thing?  I’ll let you know when I figure it out.

(BTW, my new goal for this blog is to post once a week.  Be sure to call me out if I don’t deliver!)