Heri

When I first used the Internet, it was trendy to pick an obscure user name, mixed with dates, superhero references and other exotic puns. You had then sexy_girl_2000 or spideyman_xXx or whatever movie character was fashionable at that time.

A few years later, when I went to college, I just knew there was no point using again the same scheme. All other students were using pseudos while I was one of the 3 people who chose their first name, simply, to name their computer on the university LAN network.

At that time, I thought I had nothing to hide – and I might as well display my real name. Since then, I have been using heri as the username for services I use, as in “tumblr”:http://heri.tumblr.com, “flickr”:http://flickr.com/photos/heri_quebec/ or “twitter”:http://www.twitter.com/heri.

Sometimes though, there is the occasional web app I just want to try out – a new service I knew I was just going to use once, so I would register using the fictionous username of joewall. It was the name of the main character in a cartoon, a soldier from WWII who would never say his name, and I thought I was in the same role. And joewall is a pseudo that is never taken online, while heri was often taken by some other user.

Somehow, I have just been thinking that I should drop the pseudo joewall and use my real name everywhere. I have discovered that people are reckless and have random behaviour when interacting with users who have made-up names. In the other hand, if I use my first and last name, comments and posts tend to be (a little bit) more polite. And if everyone was actually using their real name and show a real photo, I am sure there would be less stupid behaviour.

Now my point is: if you are building a web service, ask for your user’s first and last name and display them. People would then begin to trust each other and use the service for real stuff, like organizing their events and groups, _Ã la_ facebook. Don’t ask for a username. Ask instead for an email in the registration process. Your users will thank you for that, and you will get a service that has actually a meaning for the users.