* When names become all too common
Last week’s newsletter about the current discussion of the reuse of identifiers within the OpenID community prompted my friend in Oz, Brian Brannigan, to point me to a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald – “Too many Wangs equals an identity crisis”.
The article points up a crisis currently occurring in China – the naming of babies. It seems that, traditionally, the Chinese use only single-character surnames. Eighty-five percent of the country uses only 100 surnames. Wang and Li (Lee) are each used by 7% of the population. That means, of course, that there are lots of folks running around with the same given name/surname combination. For example, according to the article, there are now 100,000 people called Wang Tao! Fortunately for them, there’s no requirement for uniqueness within the namespace of the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, which controls naming rights in the country. But there is a strong movement afoot to allow compound names combining the surnames of both the child’s mother and father (so Ms. Wang & Mr. Li could have a child surnamed WangLi. Or LiWang depending on who fills out the form, I guess).
The ministry could, I suppose, use a system similar to that used by popular Web sites and require each subsequent registration to carry a numeric qualifier: Wang Tao 1, Wang Tao 2, Wang Tao 3, … Wang Tao 99999. That’s not very satisfying to the “user”, though. How do you feel when AOL, for example, suggests you become MenelausBacciagalupe3? Not quite so unique anymore, are you?
Newer, more up to date Web sites alleviate this problem by using your e-mail address as your username. It’s a step in the right direction but there’ll still be the Bob Jones who was too late to secure bjones@aol.com or Jack Smith who missed out on jsmith@gmail.com. Bjones423@aol.com as your username still isn’t very satisfying.
Getting your own domain might help – Jack@Smith.com would be neat. But Smith Technology tied that one up almost 10 years ago. I couldn’t get kearns.com, for example, (or .net, .org, .biz, .US, .info or even .mobi!) and my son grabbed davidkearns.com many years ago.
The people at iNames think they have a better way. The unique “username” is actually a number (or, as iNames terms it, an “iNumber”) but no one has to actually remember their number because it’s tied to a user name or string that should be easier to remember, like “=Kearns”. Aha, you say, how is that any different? Only one person could be known as “=Kearns”, couldn’t they? Quite true. But “@Kearns*Dave” or “@Kearns*Dave*NetworkWorld” or even “@Kearns*Dave*NetworkWorld*California*Sunnyvale” are all equally valid iNames and none require a numeric quantifier to the easily remembered string.
It’s an interesting concept, although it hasn’t gained a great deal of traction yet. Open source proponents think it’s too commercial and commercial vendors don’t want anything to do with something they didn’t invent. But, as the Chinese Ministry of Security is finding out, sometimes you just have to break with tradition (and your prejudices) if you want to accomplish your goals.
