My name is not a URL

Great article. One thing to point out is that iChat allows you to integrate with your Address Book, so that if you <i>want</i> you're able to set things up to use real names when you're talking. It makes vcards that much more useful.

URL-names just hit me as the breakthrough of Twitter, actually. I hadn't understood the power of Twitter at all until the other day I was reading a blog where the author referred to someone as @handle. My name is not unique: but, if we had a service that got enough adoption that gave everyone a globally unique string identifier, you could unambiguously reference real people across any medium. That's really powerful, and I think it's just starting to dawn on us the different ways we could use that. I still don't see an obvious monetization strategy; but people said the same thing about Google in 2000, so I don't want to be one to talk on that.

Interesting article but it's been a while since I've so strongly disagreed with everything someone sensible has written down in such a delightful manner ;-)<p>Just to pick two examples:<p><i>success will find the designer who most nearly replicates the world offline online</i><p>No way! Microsoft Bob, anyone? Dragging offline metaphors online <i>can</i> work but it fails more often than it succeeds (it even goes deeper than that - think of those who replicate desktop interfaces on the Web.. eugh!). The online world is a new one, not one that should mirror the offline world. Heck, even the newspaper industry is finally waking up to that one..<p>And with regards to Twitter URLs vs Facebook URLs, etc, I can use my Twitter URL as a URL in all my OTHER social networking sites, on my business cards, in my e-mails, etc.. but Facebook? I need a URL to be able to do that. Further, I'll often use URLs as a direct scheme to find things I want.. example I <i>know</i> that I'll find some interesting Python stuff if I go to: <a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/python" rel="nofollow">http://del.icio.us/popular/python</a> .. or how about interesting "news"? <a href="http://del.icio.us/popular/news" rel="nofollow">http://del.icio.us/popular/news</a> .. these sorts of schemes are a big win whether it's for people's handles, general tags, or whatever.

Seems like all these arguments are stemming from the (newly resurfaced) debate about "online personal brand", and creating an identity as such. I'm all for diluting these namespaces with GUIDs or similar--who's to say I'm the most important Joe Smith in the world?

Actually, I don't mind my name being a URL at all. My first name's Chirag and my site is <a href="http://chir.ag" rel="nofollow">http://chir.ag</a> and I wouldn't mind getting facebook.com/chirag either. Where's the option on Facebook where I can set that up?