Your Online identity
Online identity is becoming as important as your offline identity. If you are not living in stone age you will be on one of those social networks which mainly forms your identity. All those user names become part of your digital identity.
As of today, You meet most of your online business partners on Facebook1. You share the stuff with your friends and family. Your friends or partners search on Facebook to get your mobile number. Even Google (or any) search for you leads to your Facebook profile2. What does that mean to you and me? Facebook will own all your digital identity.With 250 million profiles online, Facebook is on its way to become online identity hub.
What happens if you are removed from their network all of a sudden? You are lost. Your friends, family and business partners are lost. A place where you were supposed to hang out fun has become your main identity. Now you are not allowed enter that place.
So what do I do?
Simple. Own a domain. Develop your domain as your identity. A domain can take various forms in various kinds of online transaction, but it will remain your center of identity. With your own domain name, YOU own your online Identity. Its worth spending $10/year.
Use social networks only for networking and meeting friends. Bring your friends from social networks to your site. I would like to be known as thejeshgn.com online than @thej on twitter. 2
1. I have taken Facebook as an example because it is the biggest social network today. It can apply to any online social network.Last few days there has been a buzz about vanity urls on Facebook. Some are happy and some arent that happy. All these buzz forced me to write this post.
2. Now you know why I am so serious about ego searches.
I think being active in social network is also important as having own domain. After all, the social networks we have is what brings traffic to our sites.
btw, I’ve written a blog post about getting a web identity, which I think might useful (even though it’s bit old, as I wrote it a year back) for your readers. :)
Hey Thej,
Well written post. I think the analogy is directly akin to having a passport / Govt issued ID card in real life.
I am interested in knowing how you setup OpenId on Thejeshgn.com.
Care to explain AND throw a code snippet in another post???
-Cruisemaniac