Life cycle of a social identity

I recently read an article classifying what are the basic building components for a social media and how to accentuate some of them but not all of them for effective communication.

The building blocks or dimensions as you would call them are

• Your Identity
• Your Reputation (What you would like other to think of you)
• Your Relationships 
• Groups
• Conversations
• Sharing

While Linkedin profiles concentrate on the top three (the Identity, Reputation, Relationships) the buddy social networking sites such as facebook maintain the last three (Groups, Conversations, Sharing) without bothering too much on identity and reputation.  

Most of us have two identities. One, a professional, accountable, matured self on LinkedIn and another child-like, silly, funny, no-image-to-keep-up self on Facebook and smaller social media.

Organizations also mature the same manner. Small teams with all members equal, with no reputation to keep share the maximum and are most productive. However as they become more and more successful, their reputation grows more and then they fall into the 'maintain-my-image' league and become less productive.

Children have the latter type of network where conversations, sharing, fighting-reconciling take their primary attention and identity or reputation have no meaning at all. Is this the reason that they are so happy all the time?

Coincidentally, our own philosophy says that there is no identity for any of us and there is no reputation to keep because each one of us have our own paths and no one really crosses another's. 

Comments welcome.

Evernote versus Google Drive

For a week or more now, I have been without my personal laptop. My family has a laptop and that is common property and is time shared. However I have a personal iPad and this is version 1  (read no camera) which I purchased when tablets were just being born. I also use an iphone 4 (not 4S) as my humble personal phone.


I had a need to create, modify documents, keep spreadsheets, store some emails, store To-Do notes , store addresses and yes, keep some images. Being a lazy geek, I wanted to have access to the same documents irrespective of which device I have on my hand at that point in time.  I wanted to edit part of the document when I was in my study room (desktop), a part when I was in the garden (iPhone) and a part when I was in the living room (iPad).  
Just a few days of usage compelled me to write this comparison table of joys and sorrows of document-management-by-a-layperson-using-slightly-outdated-devices. 

Summary: Use Evernote if your documents are light-weight and need easy editing (e.g. to-do,images, email copies, HTML text) and G Drive if your documents are to be treated seriously (spreadsheets, projects to be shared with others, PDFs etc) which is not exactly easy editing oriented.

Another summary:  Evernote = For the Young ; 

Google Drive = For the Mature.... LOL  :-D :-D 

Now, this is not a comprehensive comparison of the two documents-on-cloud technologies. However I wanted to share the delights and woes I encountered in this case.

*This table formatting was done by blogger from Evernote. See the effect for yourself.

	iPad v1	iPhone 4	Desktop
ENote	Creating a document : Easy due to form factor	Not easy due to form factor	Easy just like MS Word
	Editing a document: No rich text support. It could be because I have an older version of iOS and hence older version of Evernote. No notifications to guide user.	Forget editing with iPhone.	Easy just like MS Word
	Reading a document: Easy and beautiful	Easy and beautiful	Easy and beautiful
	Type of document: Text , audio clip and image insertion possible; aesthetically very pleasing.	+ image capture + Rich Text	All
	Mailing with Postbox or sharing the doc for multiple users (projects) : Not obvious	Not obvious	Not obvious
	Traditional folder structure : Not obvious (intentionally perhaps)	Not obvious	Not obvious
GDrive	Creating a document : Not easy due to poor UI (the iPad app is yet to come)	Bad	Just like any file on my desktop; Google formats may not always be WYSIWYG
	Editing a document: Use my Safari browser; not pleasing; fat fingers will disrupt	Don't even try	Same as Google Docs - nothing great as user experience but great on performance
	Reading a document: Very Poor; Pagination , magnification etc not up to the mark	Don't try unless it is a simple three liner	Same as desktop
	Type of document: Great and I did not feel inhibited in any way. I can store most types of documents.	Same as iPad	Very easy and very traditional mind-set interface
	Ease of storing/availability from cloud: Stored instantly; Very good performance	I wouldn't try due to form factor	Just my desktop folder synced up and down
	New-Gen features such as add audio clip notes, click anything as image and search it not available	NA	NA

Now how did I edit this document?  Its obvious - I edited this with Evernote, cut-pasted it on Blogger's editor but will store it on Google Drive ! After all I have documents from seven years on Google Drive upgraded from Google Docs.  Reliability is higher priority than aesthetics !