The latest salvo in the fight for owning users’ identities revolves around URLs. Google just earlier this week promoted profile search and with it URLs of the form http://www.google.com/profiles/awenger (when I signed up for gmail a long time ago I thought shorter would be better – now wish I had chosen albertwenger, as I have on most other services). Facebook is clearly getting ready to launch their version more broadly and is apparently asking users whether they would pay to have a specific word as their URL (the already have the capability, e.g. http://www.facebook.com/fredwilson).
It will be interesting to see how this plays out both in the near term and in the long run. In the near term Facebook and others (e.g. Twitter) need to make a trade-off call between free, which will foster fast growth and rapid adoption, and paid, which will slow things down but generate revenues and reduce squatting issues. This is not a case of a typical digital good. While it costs nothing to produce one, the cost to produce the second (identical one) is infinite within a service (which is another way of saying you can only have one instance of each name). To extract the most consumer surplus you would run an auction process for names, instead of a fixed price per name as is the case for domain names.
In the long run I suspect that there will be real influence on people picking names for their children or changing their own names. This would not be unprecedented. Historically, people often only had a first name which was fine when the “namespace” was your local village because hardly anyone ever traveled beyond that. I believe that the use of surnames really got going when people started to live in larger cities and mobility was increased. In the age of the Internet we all live in a global namespace.
There is also a bit of irony here around the history of identity standards. OpenID was originally developed with the premise that folks would remember and use a URL to identify themselves. That was a non-starter for mass adoption because most OpenID URLs were really long and ugly and in any case people had been conditioned for years to think about a username or at best an email address as their identifier. So I was happy to see that new implementations were using the protocols behind the scenes but created a user experience that lends itself to broad adoption. Now we may be coming full circle with meaningful and easy to remember URLs actually identifying people.
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