email addresses
i realized sometime recently that i've had the same personal, family friendly email address for almost 10 years. 10 years in june, in fact. it's the one i've used for years for "official" email, correspondence with companies, school, and family.
with the advent of gmail, and the insanity of free email with huge storage capacities, and antispam filtering, i've thought a lot about migrating away from my old official address to something new. in the past, the idea of email address permanence hindered my decisions when considering new cable television offers, since my address is tied to my cable provider. having to get a new one is just such a hassle.
so, i've migrated some of my less official email to the same address i use when subscribing to things which may send me junk. i'm trying to decide whether to build an "official" gmail address to use. the problem is guessing every "official" site which doesnt regularly send me email. i migrate as the email comes in, but then i still hesitate when it comes to government sites or taxes or things like that. why am i hesitating? is gmail less safe? no. not really.
and then what of the address? what should it be? that's another thing. currently there are so many people with my name (not quite the level of "johnsmith," mind you) that i frequently get misaddressed mail which i do not enjoy having to reply to ("It's girl scout cookie time!" -- "Oh really? Are they made from real girl scouts?"). Yes, I'm an asshole. I didn't reply to the one I got from the church where the other "John Smith" (JohnSmith1) goes. I'm not THAT much of an asshole.
and that brings me to another point... i'm not certain i want to stay at gigamatic, either. it's not exactly family friendly, and it's not coworker friendly, and i guess, it's not that friendly at all. and, that's starting to be important to me again. it's evident in my coursework (as i approach graduation) that the nature of my classes now includes a LOT of web work, and a lot of personal and professional writing, but mostly professional in tone. i would never give a professor the address to this site, nor would i give a future employer access to this site. i certainly wouldn't give my parents or extended family access to this site either. i'm sure that says a lot about my own insecurities, but that's the truth.
my life from 10 years ago is falling away. the friends from that era can be counted on one hand, and they all will know me wherever i go. i was in a very different place, and while i miss it sometimes, i'm very glad where i am now, and only wish i was closer to graduation and "permanent" employment.
watching my own family change email addresses from one domain to another to another, and to get hired by one large mega corporation only to start his personal email on another's site made me think about my personal and professional faces, and start down this road.
maybe i will find that happy medium, but until i do, i'm stuck with 2 addresses.
Comments
Yeah, those are all things I've struggled with, too. I'm big on centralization, so I don't like having multiple email accounts (even though they're forced on us from work/school.)
Still, I deal with them because 1) maintaining those separate identities turns out to be pretty important, 2) using work--and, to a lesser degree, school--accounts for personal stuff (and vice-versa) is not a great idea, and 3) redundancy.
It seems like email is broken anyway; people I know are using it less and less. In my circle, more messaging flies back and forth on MySpace and Facebook than through traditional email accounts.
Posted by: Mic | January 30, 2007 4:16 PM
Nobody I know uses Facebook and MySpace except about half the college kids I know from the radio station (and you). In my writing for the web class, (granted, it's a small sample) none of them is, either.
Email's still the means of business communication and I still think MySpace and Facebook will die a slow painful death as they grow too far beyond their original intended usage.
I don't have a facebook account, or a myspace account. At least ones I use. Some jackasses registered with one of my email accounts (thinking it was a fake address) and I got free accounts. But, I only use them to mess around and look at other folks.
Posted by: giga | January 30, 2007 4:33 PM
Oh, yeah. Don't get me wrong; I certainly don't encourage the use of MySpace for *anything* (I'm still on the fence about Facebook; it doesn't offend me so much.)
I deleted my MySpace account primarily because it became one more place to track messages (that, and every page is ugly as hell no matter how "pimped out" it may be.)
Kudos on 10 years, though. I think I just hit a year for my personal address. That's a record for me. I'm really trying...
Posted by: Mic | January 30, 2007 6:02 PM
I have a bit ofthe same problem you have with the name thing. I've been slowly dropping the "Ramen Junkie" thing and shifting to "Josh Miller" but that name is exceptionally common it tends to get lost in the shuffle.
As for Lameazoid, it's not a name, not for me not for my "pseudo web company" it's a "product". I'm rather happy with that product at the moment.
So I suppose that's somewhat my solution. As far as my web identity goes I'm working on shifting ot Josh Miller instead of Ramen Junkie. But I'm also working at the same time to reassociate the things from Ramen Junkie with Lameazoid, so it's still identifiably different.
Posted by: Ramen Junkie | February 1, 2007 2:44 PM