Kyle Brinkman

What’s in a UserName?

Biography
I am the product manager at MySpace, and am one of the founders. Prior to MySpace I developed guided selling systems for Dealtime (now Shopping.com), and before that I was a doctoral student in economic history at UC Berkeley.

Position Paper
Names pose a particularly vexing problem for users and architects of social technology. In most real-world experience our names are given to us by others and are relatively fixed markers of identity. In most online contexts we choose our own names, and these names may often be discarded, changed, or multiplied easily. Although our real names uniquely identify us as individuals, our names are not themselves unique—just ask Tom Anderson. Yet in many online systems usernames must be unique, and as such can take on a kind of property status. At the same time, users in online contexts often deploy names as much to hide or dissemble identity as to reveal it: chatroom “handles” and other monikers are used expressly for this purpose. Thus usernames can powerfully preserve anonymity and privacy, but potentially at the expense of responsibility and accountability. The cloak of online names can be easily abused.

At MySpace, we have struggled with the problem of names as a tension between giving our users flexibility and autonomy on one hand, while also giving them the ability to actually find each other. In our original data model, we designed for “First Name” and “Last Name” fields, assuming—as most user data systems do—a simple correspondence between real-world and online names. Our users had other plans. We quickly discovered that while most users played by the implicit rules and used their real first names, many used the first-name field, which is displayed on each user’s profile, for anything but a name. In addition to familiar “fakester” appropriated names and affinity-based handles (“HondaLuvR”, etc.), users employed long phrases and tag lines, complex symbologies of non-alphanumeric characters, capitalization, and abbreviation, and inserted HTML and URL references. Many users changed their first names on a daily basis to reflect moods, events, or attitudes. In short, the “name” became an expression of identity rather than a referent. Although this innovation was part-and-parcel of the culture of MySpace, it has also made life on the site more difficult. Finding the friend you made yesterday, much less your high school sweetheart, can be nearly impossible given the fluidity and complexity of names; users have unintentionally sacrificed one kind of identity for another.

For this conference I would like to present the names problem in more detail, fleshing out the experience on MySpace as well as other social platforms such as IM, chatrooms, and email. In addition to some solutions for the problems raised, I would explore the possible value of standards-based approaches like FOAF, particularly in light of the need for cross-platform compatibility and the proliferation of so many different social networks.

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