@Names: The Internet's New Handles? - September 11th, 2009

[UPDATE]: Facebook’s “tagging” feature went live today (14Sep09), using the @mention format, and it seems to be nothing more than an autocomplete feature for mentioning people on your friends list. Once you choose a name, it simply substitutes the @name you’ve typed for the person’s full name, which is also a hyperlink to their profile. Facebook then seems to notify the tagged user that they’ve been mentioned in a status update. This is not only nothing like expected, but more or less worthless.

My question is this: Why on earth would anyone want to use full names in their status updates, when everyone gets along just fine with normal, fluid, conversational formatting? If I update that I’m going to a concert with Jim, I don’t necessarily want it to start saying “Going to see Blue Man Crew with James Earl Jones.” Obvious fake example is obvious – that withstanding, you get my point. It begs the second question: What the hell use is hyperlinking the name when it’s already the person’s full name?

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Yesterday it was released that Facebook will be introducing the @mention into its own update streams. My first thoughts were the same as just about everyone else: Nice way to steal more from Twitter, there, Facebook. Then, after thinking about it, I realized that it was really only a matter of time until this happened. The reason the @name phenomenon is so pervasive now may be Twitter, but the usefulness of the trend as it stands in its own right is pretty evident.

A Note Concerning Facebook: I think this is a horrible idea. I find Facebook’s amoebic growth to be appalling, but this is not a rant post (for once). For an all-inclusive Facebook rant on this subject and others, see Kristin.fm’s uncensored blog post.

In the old days we just had handles. I still use the same one I’ve had since junior high school, and now that’s morphing into an @name itself. Twitter is quickly becoming the de facto instant communication medium of the Internet, and with that comes the inevitable tagging of everyone with an associative @name.

Social Networks Are Not Islands.

People used to use an IM client of choice, attached to a network, and everyone else would use the same. It used to be AOL Instant Messenger, but that was slowly overtaken by the hoard of other services until it became simply one of many. This then led to the nearly required use of clients that handle many different networks – modern clients like Pidgin or Adium. That evolution of instant messaging can be applied today with the larger social-networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Tweetdeck now supports nearly full use of Facebook while inside the app, allowing side-by-side streams from both networks. For months now, people have been updating their Facebook statuses by piping their tweets directly over to them. Sending Facebook status updates to Twitter, on the other hand, was not so cleanly accomplished. The new Facebook feature will allow for a streamlined reversal, but only if people use the same @names on both networks. I can guarantee there are going to be many complaints in the tweet-streams about people sending random @mentions at the wrong people due to Facebook-to-Twitter update pipes.

Facebook: Well Over 200 Million Users.

As much as it saddens me to say it, there are probably about as many Facebook users as there are people in the United States who own computers with internet-connections. The numbers are frightening, considering the downward spiral the network is on (now regularly compared to its floundering sibling, MySpace). But these numbers cannot be ignored, and introducing @names in a second major network is going to have an affect.

What happens when the names don’t mix?

Remember when Facebook released the custom URL’s for all users? There was a catch that scared some people when it came time to register their choices:

Think carefully about the username you choose. Once it’s been selected, you won’t be able to change or transfer it. -Facebook Blog

That’s right. So the name-mixing that’s going to terrorize twitterers is not likely fixable. What’s more, is that with this change, within the next month or so, Facebook users are going to get used to the @mentions in their own streams. They’re then going to realize and feel the pain of the Twittersphere when they start seeing the @mentions from Twitter showing up in their Facebook update-streams. It goes both ways, after all.

To make things more annoyingly complicated, Facebook URL’s are based not off of a person’s name, but by a username (read: handle) of their choosing. When we see our friends on Facebook, however, we only see them by their names. So, I ask you, what exactly are people going to type when they @mention somebody on Facebook? Screenshots provided by Facebook (see Mashable post) seem to show some sort of autocomplete feature in play. They do not show the complete @name used.

Given the extreme difficulty in acquiring one’s own true name on Twitter, the future looks to be a messy one for all parties involved.

While on the subject of Facebook’s trying too hard, check out Facebook Lite. It’s a refreshingly stripped down version of what’s become an eyeball-hell.