Twitter, Facebook and Real Identities

Two interesting events made news in the social media realm last week.  The first was Twitter’s announcement that it would start a Verified Account program to prevent identity confusion. The second was Facebook offering customizable URLs for its users. While not directly related to each other, both initiatives go to the heart of how online identities are evolving.

Twitter’s Verified Accounts come to deal with the issue of fake celebrities on the service. While @oprah, @aplusk, and @britneyspears are all the real deal (or at least the flacks running Oprah’s and Britney’s social marketing activities), there are plenty of others, including the late lamented @cwalken and @steve_buscemi accounts (both suspended) which were nothing more than clever fakes.

With the new verified accounts, says Twitter…

…you can easily see which accounts we know are 'real' and authentic. That means we've been in contact with the person or entity the account is representing and verified that it is approved. (This does not mean we have verified who, exactly, is writing the tweets.)

This also does not mean that accounts without the 'Verified Account' badge are fake. The vast majority of accounts on the system are not impersonators, and we don't have the ability to check 100% of them. For now, we've only verified a handful of accounts to help with cases of mistaken identity or impersonation.

For the foreseeable future, the program will apply primarily to celebs and other high-profile users. Regular shmoes like myself will have to continue to monitor the service regularly to make sure that @fake_shaister does not rear its ugly head.

On to Facebook and its vanity URL program, or to use the official lingo “Facebook usernames”. This is a useful-ish little feature that allows FB users to change the URL of their profile page to incorporate a name. In other words, instead of directing people to http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1234567 you could tell them to go to http://www.facebook.com/shaitsur instead.

It’s not the most mind-bendingly awesome feature they could have come up with, but it is relatively useful at least for those of us who showed up to the land grab early enough to get our chosen username. (Sorry, other Shai Tsur).

So, what’s the connection here? I think it has to do with identity management and the shift in general in how we live our lives online. Back in the old days of the Internet, most people did not share much of their lives online and a lot of those that did tended to hide behind made up names and avatars.

Both the Twitter Verified Accounts and Facebook Usernames suggest that the standard has now switched to the other side. Increasingly, you are you, both offline and offline. If you want to be someone else, the big social networking providers will do their best to nudge you in the opposite direction.

It could also be argued that this is another sign that we are living our lives online a lot more than we used to and that even people who aren’t @jeffpulver are beginning to see their offline and online lives converging.

IMHO there’s an opportunity here for plays that will aggregate, manage, and protect your online identity moving forward. This certainly makes sense for celebrities who want to play the social media game effectively, but it would also be good for other users who currently manage their time on a variety of different social networking sites.

Comments

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