Yesterday, I started a short series of posts on the global namespace for consumer web services. My quick and highly unscientific survey of readers showed a surprisingly high usage of usernames based on real names. I suspect that to be highly skewed by the audience for my blog.
An important historic alternative has been to pick a distinctive username that bears no relationship to one’s first name and/or last name. Such user “handles” go back at least as far as CB Radio, dial-up bulletin board services and a bit later services such as IRC. In a pre-web world, each of those networks was closed and separate and there was no notion of search or discovery across them. At that time, there was also a seemingly clear separation between real space and cyberspace and for a long time separate offline and online “personas” were relatively easy to maintain.
That separation seems to be collapsing now as services are increasingly becoming social. If I want to find my real world friends on a service I need to be able to recognize them. Mostly this is accomplished by comparing the user base of a new service to some existing social graph, which could be in the form of one’s email contacts, Facebook friends or Twitter follows. In all of these cases once I discover potential matches, the actual likelihood of recognition is increased by the use of real names and – as several people pointed out in yesterday’s comments – recognizable and consistent avatars.
Add to this the overall explosion of consumer services that all require a username because they have “social” features and want to drive user engagement (even something minimal such as “favorites” generally requires a named user profile) and I believe that we have a global personal namespace problem. In fact, there is some indication that we already have a sufficient level of “username anxiety” that some people drop out of registering for a new service if they are asked to pick a username. I assume that is because they are worried about having to come up with yet another username should their desired one be already taken.
Artists have faced some of the same problems of needing a unique yet memorable name for a much longer time and stage names seem to be a common response. Quick and for 10 points, what is Lady Gaga’s real name? Or Prince’s? I am sure some people know this, but I had to search for both.
In the next post, I am planning to look at different emerging solutions to this global namespace problem, including the use of Twitter and Facebook as de-facto namespace standards.
