Since becoming pregnant, and dealing the concept of not just my personal information but also my impending daughter’s, I’ve been led down a train of thought about splitting out my Twitter stream.
It’s not just the pregnancy/impending motherhood either, but previously when people I’ve followed on Twitter go to a conference and then spam their feed with every line/speaker/thought about that conference it’s meant having to unfollow them, and then re-follow them for fear of never hearing anything in my feed from anyone else. When I’ve discussed this with them they’ve reacted by saying yes but others want to hear it. Ok, good – so let’s think about splitting out our streams a bit, let people follow the bits of you they want to (and that you’re happy to share). It’s a free service afterall!
So, I now have:
http://www.twitter.com/Thayer
– my normal account, that has my usual ramblings about life, tech and well, just stuff.
http://www.twitter.com/Thayer_conf
– if I’m ever at a conference or event to do with the digital industry, I’ll be nattering about it here
http://www.twitter.com/Thayer_baby
– this is for people I would consider real life friends only, if you’re one of those and are interested in any baby happenings 🙂 WARNING: I may Twitter some of my labour on here… mwahahahaha… It is the only protected account.
Be interested to hear from others who have split out their Twitter streams and why, in the comments.
Thayer Prime's Blog 
Compartmentalisation for me doesn’t completely work
Hello Missus.
I’ve found that although one naturally compartmentalises to save time and tryto be organised, when I had Noo, I tried to structure things a little and keep things in their own event driven dimensions – but I found that real life with babies is just as messy in explanation terms as it is in real terms 😉
ie: you may well be completely knackered because you’ve been up since 4am because Small Person cried their head off and refused to sleep but because you’re a freaky internet person you still end up idly logging on and want to say that to someone publicly. Who do you say it to. It might be that you end up mentioning it on your industry oriented list because it’s affecting your ability to concentrate today. In which case, you don’t need to put it in your Mum list, because you’ve said it anyway, so what do you do – ignore that option, or expand on it, or… agh – forget it.
I say: your life is your whole life. If someone’s not interested in a particular tweet then fuck ’em. There again, you might get some excellent advice about swaddling from someone on your wider list that you wouldn’t have got from your close mates who might not have that perspective.
Women are very good at trying to compartmentalise their lives and pretending the family bit doesn’t exist (or downplaying its importance), in order to appear more professional and together. My instinctive reaction to that is one of horror. Being a complete person, and projecting oneself as that, is another way to combat the unconscious ‘superwoman’ concept that we all have buried, creating a stream of oily guilt as it seeps its way through our professional lives.
I thought about doing the same thing but I figure that I only ever talk a load of rubbish on Twitter so a few extra tweets of “I’ve had no sleep!” or “I’m covered in baby vomit” wouldn’t hurt.
And yes, I twittered the labour.