I didn't even know Pseudonymous was a word until the last month or so, and yet I've always understood the concept. From Poor Richard to Silence Dogood, Benjamin Franklin was a masterful user of Pseudonyms. Likewise Samuel Clemens is less well known than his Pseudonym, Mark Twain. From Stan Lee to Lewis Carroll, from Bono to Ringo Starr, Pseudonyms have been with us for ages.
Facebook doesn't let you use a pseudonym, neither does Google+. In an era where online social networks are enabling political change and uprisings, so many of these online services are adopting an almost Orwellian approach to naming. You must use your real name, period. That can be positively dangerous for some people.
That's a bit ironic, since George Orwell was also a Pseudonym.
Emilly Orr writes extensively on the subject, and her research into the specific Google policies regarding the issue. I can't say I agree with Google's policies, their position on the issue ensures that I will never create an account with their service under any name (I have no Facebook account either).
But this situation is creating a vacuum, a service that doesn't yet exist. A "Come as you are, or as you want to be" google+/facebook clone could step into the spotlight now, and embrace the hundreds, nay thousands of potential users who don't want to be known by the names on their ID. As the site My Name Is Me clearly demonstrates, there are untold thousands of people who want to be known by the name they chose, rather than the name that was given to them by their parents.
This particular issue affects me, because not only have I been known by a dozen or so names over the span of my lifetime, but quite a few of those names have been retired. It makes creating an "About the author" page extremely difficult.
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In other news on a similar front, it seems that at some point, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) instituted a new site facelift. And rather than tell anyone, they made it automatically sign every AIM user up for a "lifestream". It's just another twacebook, with a twist, you can coelesce all your various "feeds" and "timelines into one single hub page, and use that hub page to "write once, post many" to forward all your updates to twitter, facebook, etc.
That would be fine I guess.. and I can certainly understand the appeal of a "one stop" social networking solution. The part that bothers me is that I didn't opt in to it, it's tied to an awkward screen name I chose during the 90's, and moreover, people have been "finding me" via my "profile" and have been IMing me every day. Random people, who for the most part can't hold more than a 3 line, 12 word conversation, and since they don't know me, don't have anything interesting to say to me.
Why are they finding me? Because this lifestream service has been recording every single "Away Message" I put into Pidgin, since the service went live. That's right.. every single "Upstairs on the Netbook" or "Playing TF2" or "not feeling well, taking a nap" has been recorded, and published for anyone to see, and indexed for convenient searching.
I went through and firebombed the settings as best I could, so hopefully my particular AIM handle should not be showing up in search anymore. But really this experience has made me consider retiring my AIM account, which I have had for over a decade.
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