Digital Identity

Facebook has been in the news lately for it's terms of service changes that have come and seemingly gone all at once. The short gist of it is that Facebook updated its terms of service to include wording that were interpreted to read as though Facebook could claim copyright and grant itself full use to any of its users uploaded material and actions. This of course sparked debate (despite Google having similar terms for it's network of services) from privacy advocates all over the place, Facebook users or not.

I've taken time to step back from my online world and examine what the impact may be of having so much of my life available in public, digital form spread across the Internet.

My first foray into creating a digital personality was way back in 1998. When I played my first PC games online (Warcraft 2? Battlezone 97?) I needed to come up with a handle, and I cleverly thought of "youbdead" almost instantly. I can't quite remember what the appeal of that name was at the time, but it stuck, and it became my common handle for at least a year. Outside of games, I used "youbdead" for my first personal email account on Hotmail, although I doubt that account even exists anymore.

EverQuest in 1999 saw a much more common identity appear. When I created my first character on EQ I found "youbdead" to be an inconsistent fit with the fantasy universe of the game, so I chose something more fitting. This was my freshmen year of high school, a year in which I took my first art class, and we studied a bit of Roman art history that year, and while working to come up with a character name for EQ, I mistook the spelling of "Pantheon" as "Partheon" - which became both a character and my longest-running common name online.

I jumped on the Yahoo Instant Messenger bandwagon first. I didn't have any friends connected on Yahoo, but I needed a new e-mail address and the IM service came along for the ride, so I signed up with Yahoo as "partheon2000." This is my oldest, still-used online identity, and of course spawned "partheon2001" on AOL's IM network a year later (as more of my friends from high school had AIM screen name's too). "Partheon" became a common name in many aspects of my life: game characters, website user names, aliases on the web.

In 2004 I began to feel as though the "Partheon" moniker was becoming a bit tired, so I began searching for something else. I initially tried variations on "Partheon" by looking to other Roman and Greek lore or history for inspiration. Nothing stuck; I wanted a short, easy, exclusive name that would likely be portable across a wide network of websites. I found a name that wasn't nearly as tired as "Partheon" was, and it was borne from a nickname that I had acquired from a teacher at my high school two years earlier: The Big B Bruno - "B3." While "B3" was certainly catchy, it wasn't portable at all - every website I've tried registering at already had that name snatched up. Despite this, "B3" is still my most common modern online identity, and I use it as much as possible.

"B3" may be my last anonymous online identity, however. With the rise of Facebook, my real self is finally online and exposed in ways that I would have freaked out about five years ago. I'm known on Facebook as "Brandon Bruno" - my real name - and I have tons of personal information about me on display or archived somewhere on Facebook's servers.

What Facebook is wants to become some day is the digital, Internet-based mirror of ourselves. One day we will exist as ourselves and as our online identities, and Facebook wants to be that identity. I find this convenient, if not a little revolutionary. Anonymity has always been the rule of the Internet, but Facebook seems invite our true selves to the Internet: our names, our phone numbers, our pictures, our addresses - anything we want, really. At the same time, this is Facebook's biggest strength and its biggest weakness: it has access to a highly marketable database of our personal lives, but it must strike a balance between selling its users or selling them short.

I believe that Facebook could one day be an important tool for online identity management. With features like Connect already rolling out, the convenience of having one online identity that is centrally managed from a clean-cut, organized portal is highly desirable to me.

With my identity no longer masked behind "youbdead" or "Partheon" or "B3," what makes my online self unique from my real self?

That might be the big question worth asking in the coming months and years.

B3 - err, Brandon - out.