Monday, August 23, 2010

Having a baby got me thinking about social media accounts



I'm expecting my first child at the end of the month. I was thinking about whether to start reserving social media accounts for him, as I can see that unlike my name (Unique in all the world according to Google: http://bit.ly/a7Q5Ol) there are at least 4 other Leo or Leonardo Alas' out there (according to Facebook http://www.facebook.com/directory/people/B110603-3756477-3756480). And that's fine on Facebook, but on Twitter/YouTube/Blogspot and other sites that do not allow for username duplicates, it would make sense to reserve now, right? Wrong. I started thinking that 13 years from now (several lifetimes in the Internet world), when little Leo is old enough to start using some of these accounts, there is a good chance that the "Social Media Landscape" will be completely different and perhaps the tools will no longer exist as they do today... and, the race to reserve your name would probably repeat itself. Or, perhaps there will be some other sign-on method that I can't think of/imagine yet.

Well, for now I've only reserved @babyLissansky so I can refer to him on Twitter :)

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for the update, Ana. I was wondering how close you were to the blessed event. =) I'm betting that you'll have to continue to reserve identities on new services as they begin to show promise, but I can't imagine what will survive over a decade into the future. I actually hope that OpenID or something like it will eventually replace these separate identity/login profiles I have to maintain everywhere. I love services where there's no new signup involved because my key of choice is already accepted.

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  2. baby is due this Saturday!
    Difficult to predict the future with the internet. Look at just 5 years ago, when I only had but a handful of accounts, and now have over 40 - it's just gone insane and needs a "fix"...not sure if OpenID will end up being the standard fix, but the key here is standardization.

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