One of the most transformative innovations on Twitter has been the invention of the @ symbol as an identifier of other users, which enabled conversations and subsequently a broader system of referring to other users of the service, whether in “retweeting”, recommending people to follow on #followfriday, or citing work or meetings with other users.
A couple of times recently, I’ve missed this functionality on other sites – Facebook in particular. I’ve wanted to refer to other users and have some way of easily identifying them with a simple symbol so that others would know who I meant and could find them, but it didn’t exist. I find that strangely limiting. And it’s got me to thinking about how useful it would be if we had a system of universally referring to other people online in whatever setting or service so that others who follow us could easily know exactly who we were talking about and identify them, follow them and so on.
There are several problems in actually doing this. Firstly, there’s the fact that Twitter is an inherently public medium (yes, you can “protect” your Tweets, but very few users actually make use of this function). Other sites are not as public – notably, Facebook, which has many more privacy controls by default. I could refer to someone’s Facebook page but since Facebook by default won’t let me see their profile it’s of limited use – I’m none the wiser by seeing the limited information Facebook will show me. Secondly, there’s the issue that many people aren’t on either Twitter, Facebook or any other social network. That’s one we can’t really overcome except through time (and a long time, at that). But most of the people you might want to refer to in this way will be members of one or other of these sites. Thirdly, even if someone is a member of one or other of these sites, it’s not always easy to find them if we only know them in real life, or through their blog, or as a celebrity. Lastly, there’s the issue of not being able to get the username you want and not being able to condense it to something short as an easy reference point – the @ system is great partly because it’s short and instantly recognizable even off Twitter.
These problems aside, the question then becomes how we can arrive at a universal system of unique identifiers for all the people we want to refer to. One solution is that Twitter eventually gains enough support to become the de facto standard – after all, the @ symbol gives us a very useful solution. But how long will Twitter last? And how useful will it be to refer to all people through their Twitter accounts? The limited information available there makes it a poor solution. So there’s a good chance that some separate identity would be more useful – allowing you to provide more information about yourself, linking to your various online profiles, and yet still providing a short URL or other unique identifier. There are a variety of services out there that do some of this – Retaggr, Plaxo, Google Profiles and so on. But none does all of these things well enough to meet the need altogether, although Google Profiles probably have the best shot through the sheer number of people who already have a Google account for Gmail. Microformats may also have a role to play here as the web continues to evolve.
Hopefully someone out there is thinking about this and can create a solution that will meet all these needs and more! Perhaps they’ll even combine it with a SIP URI so that you could use the identifier to communicate with people too…
