I ended yesterday’s post by saying that I would write about potential solutions to the global namespace problem for people (parts 1 and 2).   So here we go with a post on what seems to be happening (to be followed by a final post on possible alternatives).

The de facto solution for an increasing number of services appears to be delegating their namespace to Facebook or Twitter or both.  Facebook originally did not have usernames but only real names.  The problem with that approach was that the URLs for profile pages were based on User IDs, which don’t look good, aren’t memorable and don’t SEO at all.  So now I am albertwenger on Facebook as well.  I believe usernames are still optional on Facebook, although this is not entirely clear from the relevant help page (does anyone know the answer to this?).

For relying services there are a few issues.  First, it looks like there could be at least two de facto namespaces (Facebook, Twitter) and there might be a couple more that matter (e.g., Skype).   As a kludge, one could “subnamespace” by having URLs of the form service.com/twitter/username but then one still has to solve how to show usernames.  One option for display (e.g., Quora) is to display real names everywhere and try to provide additional information to help with disambiguation.  Another would be to continue the kludge and show usernames of the form username.tw or username.fb which would be pretty ugly (of course one could restrict it to usernames that would otherwise have a conflict).  Alternatively, for presentation one could punt altogether and let username conflicts exist and rely on avatars and other additional information for disambiguation.  Or one could decide to just force everyone through a single service.