Posted by Thomas Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:53:42 +0000
Chris Messina wrote a little blerb over at his blog. I read it shortly after he posted it, and thought to myself, “self, I disagree”. So here we go. :)
Vanity urls don’t seem terribly harmful at first glance, but definitely do seem a bit silly. I can understand that having a global namespace like that quickly leads to collisions, so people are forced to constantly modify whichever handle they prefer. I can also not understand certain things about people on the internet (like why they’d clamor over vanity urls and why most people on myspace choose the absolutely worst, ugliest web design principles possible — yet people love them for it).
The omission of a memorable url for my “home” is definitely a good design pattern, as is easily seen over and over by such intelligent people as Papa Goog and Flickr. Having what is basically a permalink, a static url that forever points to a particular document, photo, or whatever, is a good idea, especially when compared to urls (unlike WordPress’s urls that can change, depending on changes I make to the title of the post). This is a no-brainer. Check.
He makes some more decent points up until:
That everyone on Facebook has to use their real name (and Facebook will root out and disable accounts with pseudonyms), there’s a higher degree of accountability because legitimate users are forced to reveal who they are offline. No more “funnybunny345″ or “daveman692″ creeping around and leaving harassing wall posts on your profile; you know exactly who left the comment because their name is attached to their account.
This is where I really start “not buying it”. First and foremost, I don’t think this is a case of correlation equaling causation. Just because names are unobfuscated doesn’t mean that the quality of the comment/content is automatically driven up. I would argue that there are several reasons why the quality is so much better, completely outside of what I call myself. 1) You can’t leave messages on people’s walls you aren’t friends with. You can’t even see most people’s profiles. This is effectively whitelisting, and it works like a charm. If I don’t know you, or I change my mind and don’t like you anymore, I can block you. Everyone who’s ever read youtube, slashdot, or digg comments can relate. Which begs the question, why doesn’t flickr have this sort of watered-down spam problem? 2) Everyone I’m friends with, I actually know (or like 99%) in the real world. The people I’m friends with are people I have at least some interest in having some sort of conversation with (marginal as that conversation may be). That model builds in un-spammy-ness. Which kind of leads me to… 3) Facebook started out in colleges. And while I don’t know the demographics, I’d imagine that the majority remains in that original demographic, if now only a bit older and gradumicated. I think this also builds in high quality content, due to the fact that the majority went to college, and it’s not some 12 year old from New Jersey commenting like an idiot on Youtube.
Anyway, I’ve tried to read his post a couple of times, and maybe I’m missing the point. I agree that narrowing search scope can be useful in certain circumstances. But I still don’t quite grok how showing funnybunny345′s real name in a chat list or in my email or on a blog post or on twitter significantly increases the value of the content or relationship given that either way I know who that person is. Shouldn’t that be a simple feature of the software to allow me to give an alias to or simply rename the contact in my list to something more memorable?
Unless his whole point is that there are so many sites out there and people are forced to keep evolving their handles so much so that you can’t really remember who funnybunny345 is in real life. And that distinction probably does have value. But gmail and facebook are my primary means of communication, and everyone there has a first name, a last name, and maybe a picture, so perhaps I’ve just not hit that wall yet; that use case of not being able to recall who that person is who just commented on my [whatever]…