It doesn’t seem so long ago when my social life was simple. I had friends, colleagues, and some people who were both.

Now I have friends, Facebook friends, Facebook “fans,” colleagues, LinkedIn connections, followers on Twitter, people I follow on Twitter, Meetup friends, and my cell phone’s Top 10.

I get chatty e-mails from people I’ve never met, yet who are somehow in my network ... and sometimes I get e-mails and have no idea whether I know the person from the kitchen and bath industry or middle school.

Where once there was a clear delineation between business and pleasure, I now know about people’s businesses and their Bejeweled scores, their new cabinet line and their new puppy, the fight they had with their contractor and the fight they had with their teenage daughter.

That’s because social networking blurs the lines between personal and professional, creating a new kind of relationship, where everyone is a “friend,” and “TMI” (too much information) no longer signifies.

There’s a unique intimacy in these online relationships that can make customers feel more personally connected to you and your firm. However, the reverse can also occur, with this excess of information sometimes acting as a professional liability.

Welcome to the wonderful world of social networking, where you can be popular with virtual strangers (or virtual friends) without ever leaving your computer. Sometimes this can lead to new business, valuable relationships and unique marketing opportunities ... but other times it just leads to information overload, or the right information being shared with the wrong people, or the wrong information being shared with the right people.

Curious as to how other industry pros were using social networking, KBDN made dozens of calls this month. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the designers we talked with didn’t quite know what to do with all of this information either (see Market Pulse).

But when asked about their social networking wish lists, there were two clear priorities. The first was purely professional: a place where they could market themselves to potential clients, spread the word about their business and establish their professional expertise in a forum where consumers could find them.

For this, Twitter seemed to be the preferred choice, though some said they’d had some success branding themselves with a Facebook page, or by soliciting client recommendations on LinkedIn.