Good reference. Here's another few I'd found previously on the topic of faceted identities; There's been a bit of research on this topic in the social sciences

Good reference. Here's another few I'd found previously on the topic of faceted identities; There's been a bit of research on this topic in the social sciences for a while now, for whatever it's worth, but here are some papers that I found insightful: Danah Boyd's undergraduate thesis (Danah is now a Sr. Researcher at Microsoft): http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/danah/thesis/danahThesis.pdf http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/danah/thesis/danahThesis.pdf A more recent paper from Yahoo: http://research.yahoo.net/files/pr308-farnham-1.pdf http://research.yahoo.net/files/pr308-farnham-1.pdf And this much older paper makes it clear that the idea of personal identity being multifaceted is all but a given in many lines of research, pointing back to influential papers as old as 1968: http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~jpiliavi/965/hoggterrywhite.pdf http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~jpiliavi/965/hoggterrywhite.pdf So, honestly, I've always been a little surprised that supposedly smart companies/developers at some of the hottest tech companies (FB & Google, for example) would build business models/big plans around such a simple model of social identity when it's so at odds with the way people really work.