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

A more recent paper from Yahoo: 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

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.

Nice article, thanks. I find the idea that merely describing your social connections influences/changes them to be pretty insightful, so is calling the current situation a "social version of the Uncanny Valley". His advice of waiting for the current internet landscape to organically start changing into the right direction is one way to look at it, but I do not want to wait this long. There must be a less crippled way of bringing your social life online.