On the Social Web people expose the nature of their presence to different observers, to different groups of people with whom they are connected in different ways (for instance: co-workers, childhood friends, rugby partners, etc.). However, most often there is only a possibility to share one face with everybody and have the same online status and the same status message for everyone. But many times the information we want to share with one group should be kept private from another. The most extreme examples could be found in the distinction of business contacts and personal friends. Status massages that could be fun to share with friends (e.g. “Peter: totally drunk at the business meeting”) could cost somebody a job if distributed to his boss (business context).

On most social websites the need to appear differently to different groups is largely neglected. Even the Social Networks that allow you to group your friends into friend lists (like Facebook) do not allow for such a separation. Although Facebook friend lists might be used to hide certain types of information from certain groups of friends (e.g., hide status updates or pictures), their potential for showing different status messages to different friends as well as having different availability is largely unmet.

There are however some social apps where you can find partial functionalities to support the faceted nature of your presence online. They appear for now in the form of niche microblogging and micro-broadcasting solutions. Those Social Web sites allow for broadcasting of custom messages in closed communities (like Shoutem) or to people gathered around a certain interest (like Static). However they mostly require for intended recipients of the status message updates to join each closed community which can get quite complicated having in mind the number of intended audiences a user might have. This approach certainly leads to social network fatigue – a phenomenon of loss of motivation to participate in yet another social network when confronted with joining many social networks and building identities on them.

The new service mynameisE can be used to manage adding different people to different social networks according to the nature of the acquaintance (e.g. adding friends to Facebook and business contacts to MySpace). However, it is hard to enforce this separation since not all users are present on each of those networks and therefore some of connections might be lost if they do not meet the purpose one user has given to his/her social network account.

I believe we need a more flexible and more web-wide solution for faceted presence (and faceted identity in general). One of the possibilities is to rely on an open vocabulary to express the dedication of presence information (status message, availability, whatever) to a certain group of people using an open vocabulary (like OPO – Online Presence Ontology). In the recent change of OPO we introduced a set of new classes and properties to enable just this. Maybe this vocabulary change is a little ahead of the state of available applications and services, but is certainly a step towards the faceted presence.