Would you prefer to have some blogging features added back to twitter so you could tag tweets with categories and people could restrict follows to particular combinations of categories/topics? In that way your followers could decide their own signal-to-noise or pain tolerances to the overly geeky stuff.

That in itself wouldn’t free you from worries about whether more colourful blowing-off-steam could be seen as unprofessional. When I bump into protected feeds I can’t help but wonder what are they hiding? Are they self-important? being ‘secretly’ unprofessional? or simply creeped out at the idea of putting their life on show. It’s really frustrating trying to follow threads that suddenly stop at a protected user. All or nothing seems too course grained, are you simply using two users as a kludge or do they perform some useful partitioning of intended audience and tone.

Even then how do you handle the overlap? have you ever had to turn anybody from your professional life down from @dmje? – “you couldn’t handle the real me”. It’s not like things don’t leak from protected feeds, its easy enough for somebody to make a cut&paste retweet or heaven forbid put a screenshot of it into a public presentation. 😉 You’d need a level of trust and followers of both aspects would also need to understand what topics and tone where applicable to which person. It does sound complicated.

So far I’ve stuck with the one public profile, but consciously avoided passing on any specific details or names about who I work for (at least while I had a job). In my head at least this gave me some level of deniability if say I moaned about something stupid that’d happened at work. But I might well feel differently if anybody from the office started following me.

Do wonder how you use tweetdeck to keep up with so many followers in each account, I can only get 3-4 columns on the screen, most of mine are groups on general/likely topic themes. I’ve also started using brizzy whose groups also allow me to add people I’m not following in twitter. A kind of dark-follows, which stops any fringe or noisy interests from polluting the main feed, but feels a little creepy (esp. if I’m tempted to reply).