What a Dead Man Named FM-2030 can tell us about the future of user names
mcdowall.info
mcdowall.info
"...refer people to this post the next time they suggest a genius idea like a database table with a first_name and last_name column."
So what's his suggestion then? Take this list of "bad" assumptions and try to build around them? Hogwash. Questioning whether you should design around someone not having a name is like asking if you exist.
I know companies that have been making millions for 15-20 years with this genius idea. You know what's so genius about it? It's simple, the developers understand it and it works for a great, great majority of cases.
Obviously it's very difficult to design a system that doesn't fall foul of any of these, but we could at least strive for better. Just having "first name" and "last name" fields is really quite culturally insensitive. It pretty much worked when only Americans and Western Europeans were using computers, but the online world is a lot bigger now.
A comment by the author gives examples of humans who don't have names, but certainly exist: "Someone born into slavery in the Sudan, a woman born in rural China, an American baby recovered after being born into a toilet, a feral child, an amnesiac, etc, etc."
It's not quite so important for a social network to deal with this, but a government system, for example, should be more rigorous. Whatever the system, if we can be more global in our attitude, so much the better.
I don't know if this is a peculiar idea, but in those circumstances perhaps a "Generate Name" button is the useful feature.
Does anyone seriously believe that this person will go through life with no name? There are placeholder names for unidentified people, the baby will get one of these until someone takes authority for it and names it.
"Obviously it's very difficult to design a system that doesn't fall foul of any of these, but we could at least strive for better."
If your goal is to achieve some nebulous goal of being "better", then sure. Otherwise, please tell me exactly why am I wasting my time? There has to be a reason, for instance if I'm building a global system that actually cares about acquiring exact/full/legal names and every name you've ever had.
"It's not quite so important for a social network to deal with this, but a government system"
There you go. You almost hit the nail on the head, but again - if your government system is not concerned with collecting every data-point about the person's name, then why should it care?
full_name - Matt S. Trout usual_referent_name - Matt
(for "normal" stuff)
full_name - Matt S. Trout usual_referent_name - mst
(for "geek" stuff)
and, yes, if I'm registering with a site for both, I have to pick one. But at least no matter what my full name is that way I can enter it.
Not only is the tone super pedantic, but the author berates people for creating simple databases based on their simple assumptions.
Fuck that. Not very agile. It's not like we can't update it if there's a large demand for change in the way names are collected.
Some people have two, three or more names.
Now what?
My entire point here is that if it's really important to the system being designed, that the correct answer will occur to you naturally. Honestly, if we design a system that requires full legal names and we don't look into the laws of the target region, then we're probably not too bright.
Do programmers routinely look up the law for common assumptions? I'm guessing no.
And by the way, the tone of your responses in this thread is the first time in my years of HN participation (under various user names) that I've wished for a plonk file. Everything you've said has the core of a relevant argument, wrapped in condescension.
It doesn't make them any less intelligent than the author of this article. The cutesy way that list was written and that comment at the end of the article was what I was responding to earlier, but anyway...what exactly did I say to you or anyone else that was so condescending? I'm not saying that I'm not slightly intense at times, maybe I ask a lot of rhetorical questions... Sorry.
You can't have just FullName, because parsing the name for it's components is incredibly complicated. (E.g. some people have last names with spaces in them.)
A suggestion below says FullName and PreferredName, which would probably work for many applications.
Only if we presume:
1. Registering people with the same name is difficult-to-impossible. -- And/Or -- 2. Systems that future generations care about will have been invented at some problematic chunk of time before they attempt to register for them.
As to 1) I believe even Facebook can handle the multitude of "John Smith"s fairly painlessly. And 2) is borderline laughable.
The person at http://www.facebook.com/john.mcdowall is not me, nor is john.mcdowall1 and so on.
But it loses the connection to ancestors that our current naming culture has. My name (first, middle, last) refers to some of my ancestors. I would not change that name. I have a few screen names that I highly favor and use in emails, forums, and gaming high scores, but I still also like my given birth name for it's genealogical associations that link me to my identity across generations.
Similarly some people's names are chosen for religious associations. In any case, will we abandon our current naming culture in favor of personally chosen names in the style of online identities?
You do know that multiple people can share a phone number, right?
Not necessarily; for example, people could generate their own UUIDs as identity tokens.
I disagree with this too, because "who you say you are" is not a single thing; it depends on the context, and you ought to be able to control what connections people can make between different contexts.
For example: I might want to give one ID to my doctor, to connect it with my medical records, and another to the DMV to identify me for a driver's license. There is no reason why these two IDs need to be the same: in other words, there is no reason why the DMV needs to verify that "who I say I am" to them is the same as "who I say I am" to my doctor. Or again, if I have to prove "who I say I am" to Social Security in order to receive benefits, that doesn't necessarily mean I have to use the same ID as I use for other purposes.
Of course, some of the reasons I would need an ID are to prove that I have a certain set of rights, as in the Social Security and DMV examples, so whoever I give the ID to has to be able to connect that ID with the appropriate evidence that I have those rights. So my "Social Security ID" would have to be connected to my employment history, or at least to my history of paying into the system, and my "DMV ID" would have to be connected to my passing of a driver's test. But that still doesn't require any single central authority to dispense or verify IDs; I could still generate my own UUIDs for each of these entities and then allow them to link those IDs to the appropriate information. The fact that we allow the government to create one central "ID" for us does not mean that's the only way to meet those needs.
Is that situation, in which merely a URL doesn't precisely map to your stated identity, somehow broken in a way that an "FM-2030" mass-name-changing cultural solution would fix?
Particularly when we consider that, to date, username preferences are for decidedly not unique options. They tend toward things like, HaloFan1 and JohnSmith73 and MrMcDowall.
Further, in almost all modern cases, these are just getting translated back to non-unique names and nicknames for display.
That said, you know there's programmers out there not using the Stripe Button and coding forms by hand that will have validations on them for the First and Last name because they think it's the right thing to do. I've seen it.
Pg 27: https://cms.paypal.com/cms_content/CA/en_US/files/developer/...
So I just put 'First Name: Jack' and give him 'jack' as his username.
Except they don't. I have a one-word legal name and I have rarely found any online from that allowed me to have less than two names. I realize I'm an edge case, so I just make up something for the other field.
Ironically, I practically begged Google+ to allow me to use my real name, which they require for their "fine dining experience" (<cough>advertisers<cough>), but they refused because it was less than two names and looked fake. They may have finally worked that out by now, I left the building long ago.