(this post has an update at Categories of virtual Identity II)

To create some order in Virtual Identity I tried to catogorise them (although I understand that it’s an impossible task) On Opinity they made 4 categories

Opinity Categories
1. Commerce (Ebay, Yahoo!, Amazon)
2. Dating (Yahoo!, MySpace, Friendster)
3. Community (Flickr, del.icio.us, Yahoo!, MySpace, digg, LiveJournal.com)
4. Games (Yahoo!)

and two “other”

I blog
II e-mail address

If there is a wish at Opinity to be bought by yahoo they are not hiding it, or is it just that Yahoo! is indeed the biggest social company? (as suggested by this article)

Since I’m not into online gaming, nor dating, i will stick to Commerce and Community. I created my own categories in the virtual identity

My Categories
1. Knowledge (As there is in writing and blogging on particular “scientific” subjects)
2. Technical (Like knowing for sure that an identity is real Opinity and Microsoft Identity Metasystem)
3. Economical (As there is the EBay Feedback)
4. Social (MySpace, Hyves, weblogs, MSN)

So why try to categorize it, well partly for my Thesis i need to be clear on which particular subject of identity I’m going to work, right now I think its the most vague one Community / Social. How is ones identity created by interaction with other users (and applications). And still then it’s not possible to talk about the social community as Kim Cameron points it

digital identity is related to context, and the Internet, while being a single technical framework, is experienced through a thousand kinds of content in at least as many different contexts (source)

I think it’s good that i gave virtual identity some borders although there is still a big shared field with the other categories. The remarkable thing is perhaps, that these categories are different from the offline identity categories i would make for myself. I would say I’m a boy, a student, a friend, an employee and a housemate. More roll based categories, while my virtual categorisations is more reason driven? Perhaps an interesting research project would be “how do people divide their virtual identity” (interesting but not mine). An other question is why I haven’t found anything on Instant Messaging, a research subject for comming week.