I’m sure you’re all very aware that the powers of the Internet are shifting from sharing information to providing services. It’s a trend I noticed early on after trying out early versions of Housecall by Trend Micro for some of my anti-virus needs.

One of the ‘greatest’ services of the past couple of years is Social Networking. Websites like MySpace and Facebook have allowed us to keep in touch like never before. Other websites have come and gone, like Digg, Netscape and Stumbleupon, but MySpace and Facebook were always the strongest. I’d argue that their very existance has helped shape the future of the Internet, no matter how awful MySpace looks or how evil Facebook may be. They’ve definitely contributed in their own ways, for example, MySpace helped bring streamable music to the masses and made their mainstream audience aware that music could and should be available immediately from the click of a mouse.

Facebook had different plans.

It’s safe to say that MySpace is still king of the Social Networks, even though a lot of us have grown up and realised how truly awful it is. The reason it is still king is because of what made it popular in the first place (considering it stole all its ideas from other websites (Blogging from early journal websites, Music from PureVolume, etc). Primarily, music and the media will make sure that MySpace is still alive and kicking, even though without a gigantic rewrite and redesign of everything on MySpace it will surely fall to the hands of Facebook or the next best thing. Facebook decided that functionality is where it would win, and win it did! It crawled out from the depths of a world-class university to a worldwide application for millions.

For those that jumped from MySpace to this website that everyone had been talking about, we met with a strange realisation, and that was the lack of a username field. For very smart reasons Facebook had decided to do away with the unprofessional, childish username and stick to trusty, occasionally-disgusting email as an identifier. To the public, we were discovered by our name, and it worked wonders! By searching up the names of friends one can find anyone they know (under the assumption that everyone is on Facebook); much easier than trying to do a wide-area search and matching photos with faces. Considering a large majority of the people I know on MySpace and Facebook have profile pictures of themselves and some form of alcohol in their hands/stomachs it sometimes gets hard to tell them apart.

In a way, it feels like the Internet is growing up with a lot of us. I remember spending hours of my life just surfing the Internet, talking to people on forums, participating in online communities and so on. Back then, your username defined who you were, so being a kid mine changed every year! Sure, by having our names we open up a large can of worms when it comes to user privacy and what companies like Facebook wish to do with our information, but right now a name works wonders when it benefits the user.

Now, the ideals of Facebook and loads of other websites that I am sure have removed usernames from defining users. On a Blog or professional social network it is very common to see users posting under their full names, or at least their first name. In essence, we have learned that usernames are a part of the Internet we don’t wish to remember, and with some of the awful usernames I’ve seen in my time all I can say is good riddance!

To be honest, I’d expect these changes to soon be implemented in software, with usernames being disregarded in favour of the users’ email. Email addresses are so easy to obtain nowadays that it is almost impossible for someone to not have their own or not be able to set one up for themselves. Whilst I do not believe that the online world should be mixed with the desktop world (because not everyone uses their computer for online use) I do believe that a username is not the best way to go about authenticating a user. A full name will work wonders when the functionality of the service requires a name, and an email will suffice for now. Who knows what will be the next wave of authentication on the Internet. It might even be OpenID!