This post and the one before it stem from a post I read this morning by Charlie O’Donnell about the future of the calendaring industry. While Charlie raised many important points, I was struck by the quote below:

I hardly know anyone who uses any calendar other than one their job forced them to… and less than half of the Outlook users I know put personal items on their work calendar. (italics mine)

We have different identities based on the various relationships we have. And software isn’t designed to help us easily maintain these identities. It is painfully evident in the calendaring space but is a problem in many areas of digital life.

I have a Google calendar that tracks my birthdays, social engagements, doctors appointments, Browns games, and other goings ons about town. I will have a work calendar when I start my new job in a few weeks that will be dominated by meetings (and my secretary). And never the twain shall meet. This is primarily due to the fact that the existing software can’t easily handle the problems of trust levels and interoperabilty. It can be done, but not seamlessly.

I face the same bifurcation issue with email. In a few weeks I will have a new work email address to add to the host of personal addresses I maintain. Again, the software isn’t up to the challenge of easily handling correspondance with various constituencies from one interface. I want the work address and boilerplate to be used when I contact a client or a colleague. I want my personal address to be used when I contact a friend. And I don’t want to have to manually adjust these settings with each message.

When it comes to this blog, I feel the push and pull of these competing parts of my life. There are stories I would tell, thoughts I would share, if not for the fact that this blog is in the words of Stephen Dunn, “open on all sides, in cahoots with thin air.” Setting up a second blog would only make thebifurcation more permanent. I want to present a public blog and filter certain posts for friends and family. I am sure I can set up some sort of pass protected site, but no blog software has made it easy as far as I can tell.

I guess in the end, I want technology that works the way I do (and, I surmise, we all do). I may be asking too much, but any company that can create software that changes identities - seamlessly - depending on the relationship involved, will come out on top.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 29th, 2006 at 11:01 am and is filed under Identity, Technology, Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.