Nick’s Blog

Handles, Aliases, Nicknames, Vanity URLs, etc – you know them by many names. They’re our unique identifiers, quick ways to pick each other out in conversation, be it online or offline. Maybe they represent a bit about our personality, or maybe just a shorter way to say a really long name. Whatever the case, people’s unique identifiers are fundamental to our most social of capacities – language – and they live with us wherever we influence conversation.

In the wake of Facebook’s announcement to begin giving ‘Vanity URLs’ for users, it’s useful to look into a few properties that make up these unique identifiers, to determine how this change will play out.

Properties of Names

First, our degree of influence is our uniqueness. The more influential you are, the more unique you are. When we have a nickname, that nickname is known to everybody we carry influence with – but unknown to everybody else.

Second, our influence has many colors – the multiple circles of influence within our various social groups. Each social group may know us by a different name, and perhaps different behaviors. Sometimes these colors overlap – Ziggy Stardust, David Bowie.

Third, our influence changes degree and color over time – different people are influenced by us at different times, in different ways. The most influential capture their uniqueness far beyond their lives – Lucy, Buddha, Caesar.

Fourth, uniqueness is |finite|. Our language can only carry so many memorable identifiers, be they words, names, or made up bundles of meaning that can be unpacked by those in the know. Further, our minds are tuned to remember particular combinations of sounds / letters / numbers better than others, further reducing what is memorable. John is easy to remember. John293 is harder. J3ho9n2 or Ohjn293 are really hard.  These combinations differ across cultures.

Effects of Using Vanity URLs

Given these properties, what is the effect of a Vanity URL on a service like Facebook with 250mm users, expanding by tens to hundreds of thousands daily?

A. It flattens influence. People are no longer nicknames in a community or circle of friends. They’re entering a single, global community, with one color (no dupe accounts!). This washes away any meaning one may have applied to their nickname, and replaces it with the reader’s best guess.

B. If Facebook’s world domination plans succeed, Vanity URLs supersede any other uniqueness one has. In other words, as you continue to be engaged by Facebook’s awesome features and community, this unique identifier is with you forever, and it matters more than any other by orders of magnitude (e.g. it’s your first Google hit).

C. It bumps against finite limits of uniqueness to language. The easy and unique (John) will be replaced by the slightly less easy and unique (John21), then the more obscure and unique (AloofPanda), then the obscure and un-unique (AloofPanda21). The more you go down this road the less likely these names will stand the test of time, and users will be less satisfied with their past choice.

D. Similarly, it draws unnecessary attention to itself. Having the ability to set my name as AloofPanda, or Nickpunt, or just Nick, means that people will pay attention to these, yet they do a poor job of describing me. The details of my profile and the many dimensions, labels, brands, and whatever else that define me are now down to a few letters and numbers that stand out but don’t say anything, or worse yet, say the wrong thing.

An aside: Vanity URLs are Generally Good

I don’t think Vanity URLs are all bad. In fact, Vanity URLs are excellent ways to identify people in small groups or communities, because they function like nicknames, and because people’s influence changes colors over time as they move between groups. They are successful in almost all communities out there.

I’d go as far as to say that most startups doing anything with social networking or online communities should absolutely offer them to users. They’re useful and will attract and engage users, and getting engaged users is the #1 priority for these startups. You have to first build community (who value nicknames), before you can build meta-community (who don’t as much), and frankly the meta-community / digital identity battles are now the domain of massive, established players like Facebook, Google, and QQ, who may likely all go open regardless.

Facebook’s Situation

Right now we have Facebook offering today a global, persistent, and incredibly important online identity around a highly engaging product. Through good timing, properties of their early market, sticking to their design principles, and possibly indifference, Facebook has succeeded despite the value-add that Vanity URLs offer to smaller communities. Yet they’re now at a point of being so ubiquitous that they could conceivably have the digital identity for every person on earth that is online in the next 10 years.

Facebook wants to own your digital identity and build the best services around that identity as possible. To do so, Facebook needs an easy way to find / reference / share people, and provide fully public profiles as well as more detailed private ones with different privacy gradations. All stuff that’s being improved upon every day. So what’s the right move for the next year? Two years? Five years?

My opinion: Stick with the numbers

In my opinion it’s precisely now when using numbers as identifiers starts becoming valuable. Why?

a) numbers are highly scalable
b) numbers are something users are indifferent to (vs worried about)
c) finding / referencing / sharing people is getting better (and URLs are less and less important) as we gain better tech, better data on each person’s social graph, and better interface designs.
d) (Facebook-Specific) it’s the status quo

Given the above-mentioned drawbacks to Vanity URLs, I think that although meaningless and hard to remember, numbers actually make sense for Facebook. Therefore, my big question for Facebook is “Why Now?” At this point, for everyone who is not an early adopter (specifically, in the hours and days following 9:01pm this Friday), you only get the downsides of Vanity URLs – the feeling of being un-unique (John291), the lost-in-translation meaning (PandaMedic), and the following user discomfort and worry (why did I call myself PandaMedic? / I am *definitely* not SxyGirl17 anymore).

Fin

In conclusion, obviously there are many short-term benefits to adding vanity URLs, especially to smaller sites. However, we can never reduce the digital identities of everybody on a global scale into a single string, and doing so carries with it many downsides that get worse in time. If the whole purpose of this is to aid in finding, referencing, and interacting with people, we need to focus on the improved data, technology, and interfaces that will get us there, and worry less how things are named.

nickpunt online communities, product design, psychology, socnet

nickpunt culture, online communities, product design, psychology, socnet

I’ve been waiting for a while for more research to come out like this, describing how thought, ideas, or (in this case) opinions travel between people. I’ve had a project I’ve wanted to create based on these concepts for about a year now and one of the things that has held me back was the lack of research we have in this area. Understanding this kind of transfer of knowledge is incredibly fundamental to community design and education, as much of our learning and motivation to learn is the result of how we organize ourselves around the social environment.

One of my favorite thought experiments is what level of free will, versus environmental condition, make for the integration and acceptance of knowledge one has been exposed to. Why do we reject some ideas and accept others, and is there something completely independent of the idea itself that is driving that process? This question has both an explicit community aspect and an implicit one. Explicitly, we always have our place in the community on our mind – we naturally desire social harmony, and seek to minimize time and energy spent correcting others (as it is a waste of our energy, and we are cognitive misers). Implicitly, we have our super-ego, the internalization of our community experience, as a throttle on how much we entertain ideas in our minds. The super-ego makes sure we do not stray too far in our thinking, which in turn makes sure we do not stray too far from our community.

Another way to put this is the question I ask myself whenever I wonder why people come to conclusions: What is the easiest conclusion one can come to in this situation? These easy conclusions are what sustain us in the short term. Yet, I think it’s the few times that we come to challenging conclusions that we are expressing our free will, which in turn allows us to progress. This process, in the face of more valid opinion, is somewhat akin to the age old question of ‘do you do what’s right, or do what’s easy?’. If you plotted all the different possibilities of opinion v community you would probably find a host of similar axioms.

Another analog can be derived from evolution: gradual change versus punctuated equilibrium. Communities may make the choice to let the larger meta-community affect them as it will (gradual change, external determination), or some members may choose to build islands from the rest and engage in a more punctuated, self-driven change. Some of this probably sounds like regular old decision making, but it’s not a well explored area in the context of communities of learning.

In my opinion, there’s no question we need better metacognitive education: metacognition frames, motivates, and strengthens our learning, and this power of reflection is perhaps one of the few truly human pursuits. It is the best, and only, tool we have to overcome our natural cognitive flaws. In the context of opinion and idea dissemination and adoption, we need to understand how we pick our battles about what divergent information we choose to accept. Now the design challenge: how do we teach people to identify and overcome community bias?

nickpunt online communities, psychology, socnet