What's in a name? Well for me, my name is becoming more and more important, as far as my online identity is concerned. This is because, as social networking starts to take up more of our time and more social networking websites appear, we are looking, as individuals, for consistency by ensuring we have the same online presence throughout.
A prime example of how important a name is can be easily found by just looking at Facebook this week. Facebook decided to bring in usernames, simply meaning people could find your profile by typing facebook.com/YOURUSERNAME, because it was a feature of other sites and they don't want to lose visitors, so if you can't beat them you join them (or should I say copy them). With just a few days notice of this happening, Facebook managed to attract 500,000 username registrations with in 15 minutes of going live, 345,000 of which were in the first 7 minutes, and by the time the first hour had passed 1,000,000 usernames had been registered and, at the time of writing this, there had been over 3,000,000 usernames registered. What was even more impressive was that the usernames went active at 5:01am BST on a Saturday morning (9:01pm PDT Friday night) and they still attracted that much traffic, which just demonstrates how important we do find our online identities regardless of if it is our actual name, nickname or online persona.
Our online identities has also been on the agenda of Twitter this week, with the planned introduction of Verified Accounts, which is simply a badge as it were on the top of the profile that confirms that the twitter page your looking at is that of the genuine person and not an imposter. What this means to the average user, like you and I, is not a lot at the moment (although possibly will be in the future) as it has initially been targeted towards it's more high profile users, namely celebrities, due to the number of people that have created fake celebrity profiles and are then trying to be pass themselves off as genuine, which could lead to all sorts of accusations being made. An example of this is BBC Radio 1 Breakfast DJ Chris Moyles, who has mentioned a few times during his highly rated show about the twitter imposter's who have even tried to fool some the people that work on the show, that there him, and this is where having 'Verified Account' on your profile would help.
If your not a celebrity and want to protect and secure your online identity you have to be registered first, even if you don't intend on using the service straight away. For example, there is a new site called Audioboo that is starting to grow in popularity, due to the Stephan Fry affect, that I registered with a month or so ago, even though I am unable to use the site properly (as you need an iPhone to upload), just so I could makesure I got the username I wanted, for when I either get an iPhone or for when the service is be available on other mobile phones.
Ultimately, 'What's In A Name?' is how you define it and, in terms of the Internet, how concerned you are about having consistency between the different site you use.
No comments:
Post a Comment