In talking with users over the past five to ten years, they do not fully distinguish beteen information they found and information they create. Both sets are “my information”. They do know the difference, but both sets are most often are treated the same in that it is information/media they have access to and will use them as they need.

As you point out, we’re agreeing here. In no way am I talking about a complete representation of our lives online. But services like Flickr are providing us with tools to approximate bits and pieces, and no matter how small they are they are still a large leap from what we had only 2-3 years ago.

So no, I’m not going to stop living my real life in favor of some online version. But I am going to model my life there in some ways, as we do everyday with writing, emailing, photo sharing, etc.

BTW: I’ve amended my original post to reflect our discussion.

It is not. Does your entire set of relationships with others fall into one of three categories?

I agree with your last point in your comment: the goal is to let me represent my life, not to have some programmer define my social life for me. Which seems to me exactly opposite of what you said in your original post; or at least that was the way I read your original post.

In Flickr, you can designate people as “contacts”, “family”, or “friends”. Is this not a great representation of how we lead our lives?

The point is to make tools that allow us to represent our social lives, not define our social life for us.

Eew, don’t even try. The last thing I want is some programmer deciding he (and it is invariably a “he”) knows how to “represent” my social life online. In fact, the most appealing of the web 2.0 apps (Flickr, for one) have very few assumptions about “my social life” baked-in. On this I really agree with Merholz that it’s mostly about identifying ways to let go of control, not reifying behavior in code.