One number or two?
This week I’ve read Martin Geddes resolutely against single identities and listened to Tony Fish just as adamant that the we all need one!
I must admit that I’d rather have one identity as I tend to use the same e-mail and mobile number for both private and business lives. However I think I’m rather unusual in that. I think that most people prefer having two identities, one for their working lives and one for their own lives. It’s only those of us that don’t make much distinction between the two who find that useful. Most people, however, would like to keep that difference.
However that doesn’t mean that there isn’t scope for convergence. There is - you can have a single work identity and a single personal identity. That would cover e-mail, IM, voice, whatever, without overlapping the two worlds.
An interesting example of this in practice is people’s preference for different mobile phones. I love my Sony Ericcson hierarchical directory, where each person can have a single identity, as it were, but six different numbers/addresses below. It effectively locks me into their devices as I can’t bear to go back to “Name Mobile” meta naming schemes.
