I have been thinking a lot recently about the global namespace for people. My thoughts on this are far from settled and there are a lot of them, so I have decided to break this up into a bunch of different posts.
When I was growing up near Nuremberg, Germany, I often had my last name “Wenger” misspelled as “Wegner” because the latter was a common last name in my region whereas the former is not. It turns out that “Wenger” is a name that comes from the Alps and is a lot more common there, especially in parts of Switzerland. The alpine meadows are called “Wengen” and the cow herder on those meadows is the “Wenger.”
Using a last name based on a profession was a fairly popular historical naming scheme and the relative frequency of names is still partially influenced by this, e.g. “Mueller” (Miller) and “Schmidt” (Smith). Another popular way to generate last names was by place of origin, e.g. my wife’s last name is “Danziger." In other parts of the world last names were apparently based on "clans” resulting in very high frequencies of some last names. Whatever the origin of the name though, it appears that having more than one name was a function of societies being more densely populated and/or developing stratification that made it necessary to distinguish people more easily.
As it turns out, my combination of first name and last name is quite rare. For example, a Google search on “Albert Wenger” has Google estimating only 1.2 million results compared to say 85 million for “Michael Smith” (because of how Google does this, these number as only indicative of frequency). Due to my fairly active web presence, I take up a lot of the early search results on my name.
The rarity of my name also makes it fairly easy for me to get “albertwenger” as a username on most new services that I discover. There are a few exceptions to this mostly from a time when I was not yet consistent in my choices (e.g., I am “albert” on disqus – should probably fix that, if it’s not too late).
Somewhat annoyingly I don’t have “albertwenger” on Google profiles (I am “awenger” there) because I created an “albertwenger” account but Google got stuck in the account creation process before I could complete it and then on retry claimed that it was taken (which means it might still be in limbo).
Would love to hear from others whether they (1) use some combination of first name and last name for their username (maybe with some numbers thrown in) or (2) a completely made up username. And also whether they (A) mostly use the same username or (B) mostly have different names on different services. So with this scheme, I am in 1A – mostly using albertwenger across services.
What do you do?
