5 Things I Think I Already Knew

So, there's this thing called a social graph. And, unless you're living under a rock (in which case you're likely not reading this), you have one. Your social graph shows how you are connected to all the rest of us in this virtual, social world. Whether you like it or not. In old school terms, it's the Six Degrees of Separation Game -- involve Kevin Bacon if you must.

So, to get a glimpse of my social graph, I turn to Facebook (who else?). There's this nifty little app called TouchGraph that magically pulls in your info and maps out how each of your friends is connected to you and everyone you know. Here's mine (I'm the big red blob in the middle with a rectangle in the center):

What this shows:

1. I have the majority of my connection from my former workplace, the newspaper.
2. I have a lot of friends, too, through my husband's former workplace, the aeronautical university.
3. High school friends make up the fewest dots.
4. College friends take up fewer circles on the graph, but I know I have more of them than high school friends on Facebook. I'm unsure of the color-coding/grouping on this.
5. The university in my hometown holds a fair number of connections for me, even though I never attended.

What I learned:

• The top-ranked "friend" was my husband (whew!). We look normal to the world. Hooray.
• The person who shares the most connections with me is not my husband, but the woman who sat next to me at work for nearly 9 years. This said a lot to me; it showed just how much what I did influenced who I knew, who I became, and who I associated with.

What I already knew:

• Of course (whew!) my husband would be my number one connection -- I see him every day.
• I know a lot of (former) newspaper people. I consider many as family. Why wouldn't the place where I spent the majority of my time and professional energy generate the most connections? It was a media outlet for goodness' sake, why wouldn't my coworkers also be members of the social media, too? Print people aren't all lame.
• While high school and college generated life-long friendships, I'm not nearly connected to most of them as I am the people who shared more of my adult life. It's true -- school is a time of social growth, but truly only a few stand the test of time (cold, hard fact. Sorry, classmates.). Those standouts rank as the big blue blobs on the social graph.

While it was interesting to see the lines move from friend to friend as I hovered over their name, ToughGraph's at-first creepy look at my life didn't really tell  me too much I didn't already know. What my bigger question (and later blog post) will ask is, how do I go about creating and managing this online identity/social graph/whateveryouwanttocallit that covers my professional, personal, and creative identities?