Social Media Increases User Information Management Burden

On Monday December 7th, Google began including real-time feeds from Twitter, Facebook and MySpace in search results, with more real-time feeds to be added in the future.

Certainly, the upside is the accessibility of a lot of outstanding content created/captured in these social applications. The downside is that it also increases the burden on each and every user to:

• pick the right (one or few) communications/ information sharing channel
• manage privacy settings/security in each channel to ensure that only the information we want broadly available is broadly available - in so much as the software enables you to control security
• be expremely dilligent about reading social networking sites privacy policies
• carefully consider the broader impact / implications of content contributed in one context to other contexts / channels through which you are known - for example, being consistent with ideas and perspectives across multiple channels to ensure that contradictions aren't surfaced and criticized in online discussions
• manage the connections / potential colisions between one or more "personal' presences and professional ones - it may be getting more and more difficult to separate the two
• be dilligent about the type and nature of information about themselves they expose on the internet as it is becoming easier all the time to aggregate, combine and analyze through advanced data mining techniques

Perhaps in the past siloing of information in the differernt Internet-based social media applications provided a certain degree of de-facto information security, but, based on the recent Google announcement, "times they are a changin'."