In my last post – 05/30/09 – I wrote this:
An observation for a Saturday:
Twitter provides a unique, global identifier for any Digital Inhabitant who uses the service. In American terms – kind of like a global Social Security Number.
More later.
Yeah, well, the “unique, global identifier” part has been obvious to everybody. And more. The part about Digital Inhabitant might be useful, though.
Today – 06/01/09 – I read an article on TechCrunch by Michael Arrington in which he writes this: “Facebook will soon be allowing all users to claim a vanity URL pointing to their regular profile page, we’ve heard from a reliable source.”
He points out; ” People have also long used MySpace URLs as their online identity. Twitter, more recently, has started to become the online identity provider of choice.”
So, miserable me, I missed again. By quite a long time this time apparently.
The only thing I might be able to add at this point is that one of the reasons Twitter has started to become the online identity provider of choice is, I think, because of the “@” symbol.
If I sign this post @paulpck you know you are going to find me on twitter under that handle, even if I don’t add a hypertext link to it. So Facebook will have to find another memorable symbol if they want to make a run at that, I reckon. And I am not sure it will be easy to find something.
I would also point out that the strangeness of Twitter is that by linking a Digital Inhabitant name – Arnold Schwarzenegger – to a twitter account, you can get a quick take on the person mentioned by way of the design of their twitter page, their web site and their – for want of a better phrase – thought stream, chunked into twitter splashes. It’s some kind of psychological thing going on.
Unless the person using twitter blocks their updates which goes against the grain of the service. It’s an opt-out.
I have discussed that the only physical link between the digital world and the Real World is the cable carrying the electricity. There is a missing link – the link relating to identity.
At the moment, at its simplest for a Digital Inhabitant that link is my twitter handle. And that I think is key. At its simplest.
Now all we have to do is find a way to link it to a physical token in the Real World and then protect it. I have some ideas on that but they are only half-formed so – more later.
06/03/09 corrected typo – a kind of correction which I will no longer note.
