I've been following the #lrnchat discussion (or controversy if you will ;-) ) in various media - well twitter and blogs mostly. If you don't know what #lrnchat is check out the lrnchat blog.

Now on multilitteratus I've written about how I don't get using twitter for chat purposes. It just doesn't make sense as a communication too to do that, given that there are many chat software providers - AIM, Yahoo, MSN rooms for instance - and everyone has at least one of those logon IDs.

Anyway, in one of the blog posts that I've read recently, there was an idea to get a secondary login (or identity) on twitter to follow those from a professional context and another login for those of a personal nature. The same has come up with Facebook in the past when I've refused to add as friends people who I've just met as professional contacts. I would gladly add them as contacts on LinkedIn, but not on Facebook. The reply was to create a secondary profile for me to connect with them since they don't have LinkedIn.

Needless to say, I have not created a secondary identity. I've told people what my guidelines are, and creating a professional and a personal account just has the potential to rub people the wrong way. I can foresee a "What do you mean you don't want to add me to your personal account? We've had 4 courses together!" - type of misunderstanding.

I think that having two identities just adds to the workload of checking these services which is why I have not created two identities for facebook or any other services. These services are not like email where you can easily have 2 or 3 or 10 identities and have that content easily accessible in one standardized app - your mail client. ;-)

What's your take on multiple identities?