Buzz privacy solution

If you look at my Buzz profile, you will find that there isn't much personal information in there. And I didn't have the problems some other Buzz users had that Buzz automatically linked frequent e-mail contacts as "followers", and thus made those visible to other people. Not only did I manage to turn display of followers off, there also weren't any people on the list which weren't supposed to see each other. Because long before Buzz I decided that I needed TWO GMail accounts: One for the people who know me by my real name, and one for the people who know me as Tobold.

And now that Buzz has arrived, I can only recommend that setup to everybody. If you haven't done so yet, think of a name under which you want to be known in the MMO community, and then create a GMail account specifically for that name. Then use that account to join Buzz, which is taking of rather quickly. There is a nice MMO community Buzz developing, with somewhat longer comments and more brains than Twitter. As an added bonus you can use that Google account to comment on blogs that require identification, like mine.

I am well aware that it is far from impossible to find out my real name by various ways. Nevertheless having a separate "internet personality" works out great for me. I don't want the people who are looking for my patents or scientific publications to find my game writing, nor the other way around. Anyone looking for a job probably doesn't want his future employer to know how much time he spends on video games, unless that employer is a game company. And you might want to keep your family and your game friends on separate social nets. A "Fakename@GMail.com" account does all that. If you already have a "Realname@GMail.com" account, you can even invite yourself to GMail, and then link the two accounts together, so you receive all mails in one inbox, and can choose the sender name when sending mails out (with the default for replies obviously being the address the incoming mail was sent to).