Entries tagged “identity”

The whole world A small number of super-geeky obsessives is abuzz over the upcoming launch of Facebook Usernames, an exciting new feature that will let you put some parts of your name into a web address.

Since its announcement yesterday, there's been a lot of excited discussion of the feature, but in a dashes.com exclusive I can exclusively report this exclusive look at the future of the feature. We'll also cover how the feature's rollout will be covered by the technology trade press and the mainstream press.

June 13, 12:01am: Facebook launches Facebook Usernames. The gold rush is on!

June 13, 12:01:45am: The first completely irrational, highly unlikely theory about how Google indexes Facebook Usernames is emitted from the ass-end of the SEO industry.

June 13, 12:02am: An enterprising and mischevious nerd who is definitely not me squats on the username of a notable tech trade reporter like Michael Arrington.

June 13, 12:06am: The Facebook username system starts getting overloaded with new registrations, but their tech team clears it up in 20 or 30 minutes, for a total period of slowness of about 35 minutes.

June 13, 12:15am: A first wave of "It's alive! Go get your name!" posts go up on various technology blogs, noting that the service is running a little bit slow. None of these posts mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

June 13, 12:45am: TechCrunch discovers that one of its writers can't get his preferred spelling for his name, and notices that registrations in the system are running a bit slow. A Twitter search reveals four other people discussing the same problems, and one person that can't get to the feature at all. The phrase "The Facebook Username debacle" is first used, and becomes the preferred sobriquet for the feature forevermore. 70% of commenters mention that "Facebook Username" can be abbreviated "FU", and each thinks he is the first to think of it.

June 13, 1:00am: #FUFacebook becomes a Trending Topic on Twitter. People who are presently whining about how expensive it is to buy a new iPhone because they bought a new iPhone last year will have the chance to see how obnoxious and overprivileged they look, but will not take the opportunity.

June 13, 9:00am: The first mainstream coverage of the feature happens in the New York Times, which includes a one-line mention of the launch in a lengthy feature about Twitter's Verified Accounts. The story includes a colorful illustration of Kanye West, but omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

June 13, 12:01pm: Twelve hours after launch, a passionate and vitriol-filled flame war erupts amongst web protocol nazis about exacly which 300-series HTTP header should be used to redirect from the old /profile.php?id=500012896 URLs to the new system. Mark Pilgrim writes an overwrought essay on the topic, and 300 Ubuntu users on netbooks use their free hand to Digg the post. For these nerds, "The Facebook Debacle" refers to the improper headers used on the redirects, instead of the few minutes of difficulty in registering names.

June 13, 12:01pm: Within twelve hours of launch, the OpenID community will quietly reach out to Facebook, asking about their plans to have Facebook Usernames become an OpenID provider. Facebook will decline to comment, Simon Willison will write a thoughtful and persuasive essay about the benefits to Facebook if they were to embrace such a thing, and Andy Baio will politely link to it on Waxy Links. Months later, Facebook will actually implement the feature. For this community, this cordial and fruitful exchange will be referred to "The Facebook Debacle".

June 13, 3:00pm: I tweet a link to my post about owning your identity online. The few folks who read it seven years ago nod in agreement, and everyone else considers reading the short bit.ly URL to be equivalent to reading the post.

June 13, 4:04pm: A white guy named David discovers every variation of his name on Facebook is already taken, and finally reconsiders the condescending contempt he's always had for black people who give their kids unique names. This tiny bit of racial reconsideration is the only unequivocally good news to come out of the Facebook Usernames launch.

June 15, 8:00am: A short and punchy Monday morning story about Facebook Usernames appears on USA Today's website, omitting any mention of the word "debacle", but dwelling heavily on the preponderance of URLs with "Hussein" in them. This vestige of the Presidential elections, which briefly convinced college kids that changing their middle name on a website was a form of political activism, is promptly interpreted as an Al Qaeda sleeper cell movement by most of the paper's print readers.

June 15, 9:00am: In its opening weekend, between four and five million people (or between two and three percent of Facebook's ostensible population) will have registered Usernames for themselves. Tech pundits will say "everyone has a Facebook Username now" and refer to that assertion as an article of faith in future posts about identity. It will not be until 2012 that Facebook supports the full range of diacritical marks and international characters that let the other 5.5 billion residents of Earth use their name as a username, but this fact will go unreported.

June 15, 11:00am: In response to the growing buzz on TechMeme about "The Facebook Debacle", Mark Zuckerberg posts on Facebook's blog with the news that the company has created the Facebook Username Dispute Resolution Community. This group is tasked with creating a policy for arbitrating who can get what names, how conflicts between different people's usernames are resolved, and how to report squatting of usernames. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook. Over the course of its 18-month existence, the FUDR Community will attract thousands of comments, 80% of which ask for The Old News Feed back, and 85% of which contain one or more typos or deviations from standard spellings of English words.

June 15, 1:00pm: LinkedIn posts a thinly-veiled but very smart update on their company blog that happens to mention in passing that they've had friendly usernames as an option for URLs for years, and that it's more likely you want to show your professional profile to the world as the first Google result for your name. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on LinkedIn.

June 15, 1:30pm: The Google Profiles team will write a post that features a bad pun in the headline, ostensibly serving to announce some minor recent feature update, but in reality just trying to remind people that hey, you can get a Google URL. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Google.

June 15, 2:00pm: An enterprising young web hacker will realize that there are 24 items in this list, which means that if you add in a free space, you can very easily turn this post into a 5×5 Facebook Username Bingo Card. Combined with the Creative Commons license on this blog, it makes for a fun idea and a Flickr Pool pops up for people to show the FU Bingo cards they've generated.

June 15, 4:00pm: The first web-savvy celebrity in Hollywood will hold a meeting with their marketing team about what it will take to get their preferred username. During this meeting, the smartest person in the room will try to explain the difference between a profile page and a fan page, why there are different processes for getting vanity URLs for each, and why a person or brand doesn't have control over all the fan pages that can be created about them. That person will be ignored by everyone else for the duration of the meeting. The issue will be ignored by Facebook for nearly a year.

June 16, 10:00pm: The Domai.nr guys release a service that lets you sign in with your Facebook Connect account and automatically find what variations of your name are available as real domain names. While the feature is cool and works well, the team struggles to get press coverage for the launch, since it's predicated on the idea that you can register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

June 19, 9:00am: The Bureau of Labor Statistics will announce the unemployment numbers for May, showing a loss of 660,000 jobs, with 1/3 of them being white-collar jobs. Coincidentally, 220,000 unemployed professionals will realize to their horror that their Facebook profile now ranks above their LinkedIn profile if a prospective employer googles them, and that they have no idea how to use Facebook's privacy settings.

July 31, 2009: MySpace announces MyAddress, a feature for providing more control over the URL where your MySpace profile appears. Instead of constraining users to a few choices as Facebook does, MySpace gives users very broad control over what kind of address they can have. As a result, users pick web addresses that exactly match their obscure handles on the service, instead of using their real names.

February 15, 2010: Microsoft launches a similar URL service for usernames, providing friendly URLs for millions of people on Windows Live and XBox Live, and providing the feature to more people in one day than Facebook has succeeded in delivering usernames to in eight months. Because the announcement goes out on President's day, and because it's Microsoft, nobody really notices except for a two-line mention on Mashable, half of which is a joke about Bing. Both Microsoft's own announcement and the Mashable post omit any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Live.com.

October 31, 2010: AOL has an internal meeting about providing friendly URLs to users of AIM and Bebo, and make a bold decision to put it on their 18-month roadmap.

I hope you find this overview of the future timeline of Facebook Usernames useful to understand where this exciting feature is going in the future, how our industry will adapt and respond to this sort of innovation, and how our tech trade press will hold the powerful company's feet to the fire as this sort of capability becomes mainstream in the years to come.

And oh hey, add me as a friend on Facebook! Or become a fan of mine! Or something.

If you don't follow me on Twitter, you've been missing out. But fear not! I take care of my loyal blog readers as well, by offering you the highlights of the interesting links I've been sharing there:

• "I find it bonkers, by the way!" That's Rick Astley in his tribute to moot, as part of the Time 100 package. He's specifically referring to the the Obama rickroll video, but I think it applies in general.
• "If you love something, charge for it. ... People will pay for things they value." My esteemed colleague Andrew Anker makes the case for being unashamed of your value. (Semi-related: Four years later, my post on how freelancers should price their work remains one of the most popular things I've ever written.)
• Focus on the Family reviewed Prince's tepid new release and decided that even reactionary late-career Prince isn't tame enough for them. I would pay to see them review Dirty Mind.
• "In the U.S. people view names & identities as absolute things ... but in China, identities are more amorphous." It's a bit of an over-generality, but overall this Slate piece on names and identity was terrific. I tend to like Slate articles, though.
• Arsenio looks askance at his own Wikipedia article. I wish they would air classic episodes of the Arsenio Hall Show or screen them on Hulu or something; I'd watch them.
• I pimped the MP3 of James Brown's "Talking Loud and Saying Nothing" because it's a shame that so many people have never heard the whole thing.
• Nate Silver's TED talk about race and heterogeneity is pretty strong throughout (though the reach of some of the conclusions exceeds the grasp of the data), but I most enjoyed the point about 8 minutes into the clip where he talks about the implications of cul de sacs in (sub)urban planning.
• There are photos of lots of people wearing Aretha Franklin's big grey bow from the Obama inauguration. Most are photoshopped, but the best are not.
• Joel Spolsky gets to the heart of why B&H is a New York institution: "The whole operation is a crazy Willy Wonka factory."
• The organizers of the National Day of Prayer (you missed it last week!) have one of their key campaigns focused on praying for the media. It seems to be working as well as prayer usually does.
• I liked the new Star Trek movie, though it felt a little bit like when the eye doctor looks at my retinas. Just as enjoyable was this excellent look at Trek food, which has as its only shortcoming the regrettable omission of "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot."
• Genius illustrator Christoph Niemann's venerable Periodic Table of Metaphors is always worth another look. It's funny because it's true!

This world wide web thing, i think it's going to work out. I think it's gonna be good for the both of us. As always, "HAHA LOL" is courtesy of Alaina Browne.

Okay, these are the links you should be reading on the Internet today.

• A smart diagram is the new clever writing: LeisureArts charts out my favorite snowclone. I covered similar topics before in The Story of America and Do you love words? The diagram is excerpted here.

• The New York Times reports on Justin Timberlake's new audience. "Unlike his former boy-band colleagues, Mr. Timberlake has even won over musicians who prefer lo-fi thrash to the slicker sounds of mainstream albums." These hipsters could have been five years ahead of the curve if they'd just have listened to me.

• Misidentified Black Person of the Week. A disturbingly familiar story about mistaken captions, which references my post about the same topic a couple of years ago. Somehow this really stuck with me, perhaps because I was reading this cogent explanation of the problem with "articulate" at the same time. "It is amazing that this still requires clarification, but here it is. Black people get a little testy when white people call them 'articulate'." So, two notes for editors: Get people's names right, and be respectful. Not so hard!

• Speaking of respect, Why didn't Prince get electrocuted while playing electric guitar in the rain at the Superbowl? Because he's Prince, people!

• So it turns out there actually may be some Hunanese origins for General Tso's chicken. I've been using General Tso's chicken as the definitive example of how I became clueful about eating good food ("It's not even a real Chinese dish -- I'm a dummy!"), but I like this story of how it's a creation of cross-cultural entrepreneurism even better. I wonder if my family members in Taiwan have ever tried the "delectable concoction of lightly battered chicken in a chili-laced sweet-sour sauce".

• I'm hoping danah won't be offended if I call her defense of walled gardens articulate. It's also thought-provoking, which is high praise indeed.

• On the flip side of the walled garden conversation is PB's ongoing onfocus series about getting off the grid. The technology here is interesting, but I'm enjoying watching the thought process behind the coding that Paul has been doing.

• And finally, Google is going to start to charge some businesses for Google Apps for Your Domain. I find that refreshing and reassuring.

Every time there's a resurgence in general-audience (non-techie) interest in Google, as after Newsweek's recent Google fawning, the issue of privacy in a presence of a pervasive and permanent record rears its ugly head. People who aren't technologically savvy don't realize that statements don't fade away or remain in confidence on the web; The things we say only get louder and more widely known, unless they're completely trivial.

We're all celebrities now, in a sense. Everything that we say or do is on the record. And everything that's on the record is recorded for posterity, and indexed far better than any file photo or PR bio ever was. It used to be that only those who chose career paths that resulted in notoriety or celebrity would face having to censor themselves or be forced to consciously control the image that they project. But this faded as celebrity culture grew and as individuals are increasingly marketed as brands, even products.

Naturally, this affects larger groups of people. First it was actors, then musicians, then entertainers of all stripes. We count politicians as celebrities now, too. I realized this when I ran into Rudy Giuliani this weekend. I took a moment to thank him for the work he did for this city, but I realized from the reaction of his body language that he was much more used to being approached as a celebrity than as a politician. I've met a few prominent examples of both over the years, both more and less well-known than Giuliani, and one of the constants that I've seen is that they're the only people who pay as much attention to the phrase "on the record" as do journalists.

Trent Lott comes to mind, when we consider the permanence of a celebrity/politician's statements, of course. Few of us who were alive in 1980 have to be concerned that any of our statements from that year will come back to haunt us, let alone some of our more obscure comments, aimed at audiences that we feel might be sympathetic. But that won't be the expectation of the generation of kids growing up today. Even their most casual instant messages will be "on the record". And it's not the sort of record that suffers the vagaries of our files today, where the audio to that reel might be lost, or the words on the original obscured by an errant coffee cup's ring.

So what to do? Well, first, of course, social expectations will change. The fear everyone has is that we'll all have to be nice all the time. And niceness sucks. It's the valid part of the backlash against "political correctness". Except that most of the people who object to political correctness do so because they resent that they've lost the chance to be coarse and offensive in public. They're resenting the loss of social control that they used to have, when calling a person or a group by an offensive name was acceptable because there wasn't any social or political cost to doing so.

But if we're not going to become nice while all our words are for the record, what will we do? Well, we'll adapt and become more reasonable in our expectations of people in the public. Instead of expecting that Britney Spears never acknowledge the loss of her virginity, that she might preserve a marketing message, we'll either accept that she tells the truth, or not require her to discuss it at all. One or two generations from now, the impossibility of scrubbing every private utterance for the demands of permanent public presentation will lead to a society much more accepting of occasional flubs, faults, and flaws. Behold, the triumph of context. Metadata about a person, and hyperlinks to their lifelong record, will inform the decisions made by a public used to an informal, non-governmental version of Total Information Awareness.

So do we have to, as Scott McNealy said, "get over" our desire for privacy. Do we have to permanently filter our thoughts and expressions, lest they be thrown back at us at some inopportune moment in the future? What do we do until people are used to seeking out context, until meta is intrinsic? Well, you have to own your name.

Go look me up. Googlism's use of Google searches to define a topic was so addictive that Google's WebQuotes was created as a virtual clone. And the phrases that pop out of those services aren't entirely inaccurate. But if you do a simple Google search on my name, what do you get? This site.

I own my name. I am the first, and definitive, source of information on me.

One of the biggest benefits of that reality is that I now have control. The information I choose to reveal on my site sets the biggest boundaries for my privacy on the web. Granted, I'll never have total control. But look at most people, especially novice Internet users, who are concerned with privacy. They're fighting a losing battle, trying to prevent their personal information from being available on the web at all. If you recognize that it's going to happen, your best bet is to choose how, when, and where it shows up.

That's the future. Own your name. Buy the domain name, get yourself linked to, and put up a page. Make it a blank page, if you want. Fill it with disinformation or gibberish. Plug in other random people's names into Googlism and paste their realities into your own. Or, just reveal the parts of your life that you feel represent you most effectively on the web. Publish things that advance your career or your love life or that document your travels around the world. But if you care about your privacy, and you care about your identity, take the steps to control it now.

In a few years, it won't be as critical. There will be a reasonably trustworthy system of identity and authorship verification. Finding a person's words and thoughts across different media and time periods will be relatively easy. Getting a "true" picture of that person might be possible, even simple. But that's years away. For now, recognize that you're a celebrity, treat your likeness and personal information with that gravity, and choose which statements and facts are going to represent your presence in the global media universe. Any adult in an industrialized society who hasn't taken these steps is forfeiting opportunity and security, out of either laziness or ignorance. Maintaining privacy in the face of corporations and governments that wish to violate it requires a bit of identity judo, neutralizing their desire for everything by freely giving away just a little bit.

So, who owns your identity right now?

I was born and raised outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A few weeks ago, an editor of The Patriot-News, the local paper, asked me for my thoughts regarding the anniversary of the attacks.

To put things in context, I was always very ambivalent about the culture of the area I grew up in. Though it's very geographically beautiful, it is a much more conservative place that I didn't really begin to appreciate until years after I had left. It is also a simpler place, in many ways, which is why the tone of my editorial is a little more straightforward and literal than my usual cynical and sarcastic self. Not, of course, that they wouldn't understand my piece, but that the usual tone of my writing wouldn't really do justice to the ideas I was trying to express.

Or, to put it a different way, I'm a lot more corny and maudlin in this essay, but it's mostly because one of the things I've tried not to do since the attacks is mask actual emotion with the usual ironic distance that I tend to apply to such matters. I'm an idealist at heart, and I'd rather have that show.

Also, the Harrisburg Senators are the AA minor league baseball team, which after a rocky history had shut down in the 1950s, only to be revived in 1987 as part of a revitalization of Harrisburg. The city has flourished since, and I can't help but think that part of the reason why is because it was so inspiring to watch that team achieve such a tremendous success their very first year out.

This essay appeared with slightly different edits in last Sunday's Patriot-News.

---

A month after last September's attacks, I left Manhattan for the first time. I had holed up a bit, clinging to my adopted city as a bit of a sanctuary, wanting to hold on tightly to a New York that suddenly seemed vulnerable, even fragile. But it was time to venture out, so I found myself en route to Harrisburg, and to the town I was born and raised in.

The thing that struck me, other than the usual contrast of Harrisburg, with its quiet and its slower pace, was the distinction between New York City and Central Pennsylvania's signs. The marquees in front of restaurants and car dealerships and churches had all sprouted similar reassurances of "United We Stand" or "God Bless America", in a singularity of message that I hadn't seen since my days as a teenager in the area, when the success of any local sports team would prompt all of the signs to show a similar unity.

That driving down the street would evoke memories of rooting for the home team when I was younger probably wasn't coincidence. As a self-described member of the New York liberal media, and a man who is the son of first-generation immigrants, I was never unaware on my visits to my hometown that there were some who felt I was somehow less American than they were. Add in that I probably physically look a little more like the hijackers of last September than most people's mental image of the boy next door, and suddenly what seemed uncomfortable or unusual might now be construed as downright Unamerican. But my identity as an American was forged by my experiences growing up in these small towns.

And in those first weeks, I thought a lot about what it is to be American. That a lot of people outside of New York City might not even recognize their own country if they came to visit. The America that was attacked a year ago was an America where people are as likely to have been born outside the borders of the U.S. as not. Where most of the residents speak another language in addition to English. Where the soundtrack is, yes, jazz and blues and rock and roll, but also hip hop and salsa and merengue. New York has always been where the first fine threads of new cultures work their way into the fabric of America, and the city the bore the brunt of those attacks last September reflected that ideal to its fullest.

It was no accident that the primary target, the location deemed most threatening and offensive to those who would resent American culture, is the place where we embrace the widest variety of people. Where what it is to be American is at its most inclusive, and it becomes clear that American is not something that one does, but rather something that one is. Among those lost in the collapse of the Twin Towers were citizens of at least 42 countries. To have lost people from so many countries around the world is part of what makes those events a particularly American tragedy.

I realized shortly after the attacks that, while flying, or when crossing one of the bridges or tunnels into Manhattan, or even just in going about the course of my daily life, I might have to show not just that I had no ill intent, but that I might need to prove my "American-ness". A photo ID or a knowledge of American customs wouldn't be enough, now that those murderers had tainted those formerly unblemished credentials.

What came to mind on the times when I wondered about proving myself as an American were the images of my youth spent in Central Pennsylvania. I started to carry around in my wallet some ticket stubs from one magical summer when I was in junior high school, when the then brand-new Harrisburg Senators went from being nonexistent to being Eastern League champs. The proof of my loyalty was my history in Harrisburg, not because I had gone to a few baseball games, but because being American is part of who I am. Anyone can come to our country and eat a hot dog and watch a ball game and stroll along the riverside, but that won't make him an American. Being able to grow up amongst fellow fans, despite not knowing of the history of the Senators who played in the 50's, being able to bridge small-town boy and big-city man, being able to live both as a personally conservative son of immigrants and a politically liberal citizen of the United States: these were the proud privileges and cherished rights that made me an American.

It's a lesson not easily learned. I've seen the eye-rolling as politicians and opportunists on both sides of the political spectrum try to use the World Trade Center attacks as justification for whatever plans or programs they've always been convinced should be foisted upon the public. I've seen the grimaces and groans as challenges to the Pledge of Allegiance were mounted. I've seen good people with unpopular views labelled as disloyal, untrustworthy, even treasonous. So it bears repeating that being an American isn't something that you do, it's something that you are.

The lesson I've learned is to extend the embrace to all the members of our American family. Get annoyed, get angry, be incensed as you are with your sister who always votes the opposite of you, as annoyed as you get with your father who never quite got where you were coming from politically. And come back, shaking your head but still smiling, and enjoy the chance to appreciate those Americans that your reflexes tell you to resent. Be thankful for the chance to have neighbors or fellow citizens who raise your ire or offend your sensibilities. Be thankful that we can sit in a quiet small town and roll our eyes at the inanities of a visitor from a big city. I'll be the first to admit that every time I return to New York City from a visit to Harrisburg, I look around at all my fellow New Yorkers and wonder for a moment if they're all just a little bit crazy. And, of course, they are. Or at least they're a little bit different.

It's a difference we're privileged to have.