I live in 2 worlds

Lately I've been thinking about the dichotomy of my life - my existence on the cloud (the internet, in case you didn't know) and my existence in the real world. Since I began actively participating in the social media world, I have found that my online network has increased exponentially, yet the spillage over into my physical, real world has been minimal to say the least. Interestingly, my internet world knows (in much detail most of the time) a lot about my real world, but the same can not be said of the opposite. Most of my real life friends don't know about twitter, wouldn't know what to do on FriendFeed, wouldn't have the time to StumbleUpon, Digg, or bookmark on delicious. Heck, most of them don't even know about this blog!

So what is it that makes me so eager to share my entire life with my online community, and yet be less forthcoming with my real world peeps? I mean, it's not like I intentionally hide my online life from my real world friends - for instance, almost everyone on my Facebook page (until very recently) are my real world friends, people I actually know and added on FB AFTER knowing them for some time in the real world. And my Facebook page has links to my business website, which has a link to my blog, which has a link to my etsy and twitter accounts, so while I have not actively marketed my world wide web endeavours to my real life friends, they can certainly stumble onto it easily without me having to tell them to "check it out!" In the end, I guess it's more about the online opportunity to share - I can always fire off a tweet to say whatever fleeting thought is in my head or share whatever random experience I just had - than it is about hiding anything from the people in my real world.

What got me started thinking about all of this is an article I read on Jeremiah Owyang's blog titled "How I use Twitter, and you?" I'd been following jowyang on twitter for a while, and when he tweeted about his twitter method, it got me thinking about my own. Jeremiah's method differs greatly from mine, and that, I believe, is because of the difference in our ultimate goals for using twitter. Jeremiah, being a web strategist who blogs about how companies can use web tools to connect with their customers, uses twitter the "value added" way, staying far away from posting "personal minutia" and carrying on "excessive personal conversations." This makes sense for Jeremiah and I respect that. However, I use twitter in a different way, choosing to share what some would consider "personal minutia" with my tweeple and I follow a lot of people that do the same. While I do often include links to articles I find interesting or comment on various real world issues that interest me and might therefore interest my followers, for the most part my use of twitter is to share my daily experiences with the people that follow my tweets, minutia and all. Perhaps this is part of my "personal branding" if it must be called something; I aim to let people, whether they are potential customers or not, know the real me, the full version of the real Lara, and that inevitably means sharing "personal minutia" on twitter. The good news is that it is obviously working, since most of the @laravarona tweets I receive are in response to personal things I've shared. So, in the end, there are obviously different ways to utilize an online service like twitter and each way has its own merit.

How do you choose to use Twitter?