The Collected Me was born of the frustration of managing a fractured online identity. I wanted to collect as much of “me” as I could into a single destination. Call me a Luddite.

The activity of visiting a series of destination sites in order to find out what friend X is up to is simply tedious. I’m here, I’m there, I’m back over here again. I might need to sign in with one of my many, many usernames (having many seemed a good idea in the beginning). I’ll probably forget my password and need to request a new one. Oh wait, which email address did I use to sign up here? I’ll try this one. No, this other one. Ok this is the one, I know it. Oh shit, now I’m locked out. Sigh, as an interaction designer and a thinking human being, “tedious” barely captures the level of pain these experiences cause me. I’d much prefer a central place to look per person.

Also the structure of the community of social networks creates an artificial segmentation that doesn’t match our mental models for evaluation and cataloging of friends, family, work people, etc. The lines of lived experience are much blurrier and grayer than most social networks can handle. With Twitter, for instance, it’s all or nothing, you’re in or you’re out. If I want to distinguish between content suitable for friends vs. colleagues, my only recourse is to set up a second account. Facebook’s got a Byzantine privacy-setting UI that makes it difficult to verify if the settings you’ve just set are in fact working. It’s really not worth the bother.

The results are predicable—a fracturing of “me” online. I’m here doing this, over there doing that, and in each place talking to different sets of people, though they oftentimes overlap. Lived experience of this is far simpler. If, for example, I’m at store and I want to say something personal to my friend with whom I’m shopping, I just lower my voice or pull him aside to talk. I don’t have to go into a different store to have that conversation, or stop “my stream” in order to adjust its settings to avoid accidentally saying something personal to the wrong set of people.

I just wanted to bring “me” all together under one roof. And I wanted to catalog it and store in it my own database. This way I can at least tackle the consumer experience of the “online Elizabeth Hunt.” There’s a central place you can go to find out what I’m up to online. In time, I’ll expand beyond the few services I’ve started with (Twitter, Delicious, YouTube, Digg, and Amazon). And I hope to do something cool with the data I’m collecting. More soon.