So who is going to Pwn your Digital Identity?

Re the decision by Facebook to release personal names (www.facebook.com/your.name) I rather liked this article by Chris Messina:

Curiously, in 2005, after their surprise acquisition of geolocation service Dodgeball (now Foursquare), I wrote that “Google had acquired my life“, referring to all the identity information Google now had about me.

Now that these companies know so much about me, the race is now on to be me online. Check it out:

- facebook.com/chrismessina
- friendfeed.com/chrismessina
- google.com/profiles/chrismessina
- twitter.com/chrismessina
- flickr.com/factoryjoe
- myspace.com/factoryjoe
- etc.

All these guys want to own me (and you, for that matter). And, they all want to be my communications hub ( FriendFeed now offers email, by the way, and I imagine Facebook will get in that game eventually as well, since DiPersia [The Facebook person who announced this] wrote, “We expect to offer even more ways to use your Facebook user name in the future”).

Can't add much more to this than to agree, question is what to do about it if you don't like the idea. One option is to use nom de plumes (like Chris's factoryjoe), especially different ones on different sites, and distribute yourself over a number of services so no one service sees the complete you.

(I avoid using the most egregious privacy abusers, Google and Facebook, for what its worth. As Lord Errol has pointed out, a European willingly putting their data in a US system is then not covered by EU data protection laws)

Another is to think about the tools you need to manage it for yourself - sort of what VRM is trying to do for your consumer data. This leads to another thought, about setting up open systems to manage your online You. Otherwise, as Chris points out, your least worst option is to decide who you are going to trust to own yours.

OpenFacebook anyone? Intuitively this is the endgame for Social Media Towers, just as the OSP's like AOL were broken by Open-side Netscape

(By the way, Pwn is a geek term for "own" but could be read here as "pawn" just as easily, as the way these people make money is by and large by selling your data on to marketeers)

Bluddyell - I thought we got funny snarky sometimes but this is genius - kudos Anil Dash (Can we just mention that you can get a real, open URL in your own name )