Facebook announced earlier this week that they would
start letting users choose their own names.
But is it a good idea? Douglas Rushkoff, writing for
The Daily Beast, says no. I don't know whether it's a good or bad idea, but Rushkoff's arguments are not very well thought out.
Rushkoff compares it to how AOL let its users to the wider internet beyond the gated community that was AOL. Rushkoff writes:
By opening itself to the greater Internet, AOL revealed itself as something of a wading pool. A mini-Internet. Once people could use AOL as a portal to the true, unadulterated, global net, the company was reduced to an ISP. AOL became series of phone numbers you dial to get online, and little more. Steve Case knew his moment was over, and used his inflated stock price to purchase some real assets like Time Warner. We all know how that turned out.
There is a huge difference here between the two cases.
Many internet novices thought that AOL
was the internet. But users of Facebook are not operating under the same delusion.
Tabbed browsing has now become ubiquitous -- Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari and every new browser at there has the capability to have multiple pages up at once. I have six open here on Chrome and another dozen open on Firefox.
Why is that relevant? Because one of those tabs is open to Facebook pretty much all day.
Also, Facebook always has driven users away from its pages. Hell, I found this story on the Daily Beast from a story from my co-worker Trip Jennings on Facebook.
This would be true if people's knowledge of the internet had stayed the same for the past decade since the death of AOL as a major entity, but it hasn't. People know that Facebook isn't the internet -- they know it is a page on the internet.
In fact, using Rushkoff's logic, MySpace would never have been popular. People were immediately given the chance to create their own usernames. Yet people continued to use it until they found something better.
When something better than Facebook comes around, then that may kill the social network -- but adding user names?
Come on, don't be ridiculous.
President Barack Obama held town hall on healthcare reform today in Green Bay Wisconsin. When one man took the microphone to ask a question about healthcare, there was a moment of levity. 