With so many places to position your identity on the Web these days, from social networks to blogs, personal profiles, custom pages like About.me, resumes and so on, presenting one's central presence with a domain that bears your own name is increasingly valuable. While at times, I'd considered renaming this blog to not be so eponymous, it's served me well. Having louisgray.com for more than 10 years, and having registered it through the end of this decade, at least, means that when people put my name on the Web, they'll find content that I have created, in the way that I want it presented and ordered. And thanks to it being hosted on Blogger, backed by Google's strong "Takeout" project, which lets me easily export it and move it elsewhere if I need to, I am not bound to a third party network representing who I am. My domain is owned by me, and will be here for years to come.

The recent trend of some high profile folks, who have earned serious respect for their own entrepreneurial efforts already, to point their eponymous domains to Google+ or other networks seems short-sighted to me. While I am obviously a big supporter of Google+ and am voting with my own activity there, at the expense of other networks that are less engaged and rewarding, I do not have any plans to move my domain to redirect to that page, and suggest others don't as well.

If Google+ (or other networks like it) present an engaged audience with high quality content, and so far it does, the best way to reflect that on your own domain is to bring it to your domain, where you control it. With FriendFeed, Facebook, Google Reader, Twitter and even Google Buzz before it, tools have existed to help you share your feeds, your most recent items, and highlights on your own blog. As Google+ matures and tools emerge from the Mountain View mother ship or from the developer community, I will be bringing more than a "Follow Me" button to my site - hopefully my most recent posts and statistics will make it here as well. But when you look for "Louis Gray" on the Web, it should be my own domain that returns - not About.me, Google Profiles, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or anybody else.

When FriendFeed catapulted on to the scene in late 2007 and early 2008, we heard some of the same rumblings of people saying they were going to stop blogging outright in exchange of using the network. Others found Twitter's 140 character style made the best sense for their output, and their blogging decreased or stopped. While I don't really mind people being comfortable with different styles and migrating to what seems fit, I am hesitant to endorse forwarding your identity to a third party domain you do not control. Of course, with Google being Google, Google+ is much more likely to be around and supported strongly in the long haul than was FriendFeed, which was essentially abandoned by Facebook to wither away like a rumpled jacket left on an elementary schoolyard playground.

Kevin Rose is a smart guy and has done some good for the Web and I expect this will continue. So too has Bill Gross. Tom Anderson has catapulted in visibility on Google+ from having almost disappeared after MySpace's fade, and that's fun to see. Google+ has captured the imagination of these top guys and many more who see it as a vibrant alternative to the boring status quo that we've been shovel-fed for the last few years. But I don't think they should give their identities and domains away to the service. Because in 10 years, 20 years, 30... you'll still be you, but services and companies evolve.

One of the greatest tug of wars amidst leading Web companies today is that for ownership of your identity, through your personal profile, or pushing you to "Sign in with" their credentials. You may sign in with Twitter, Facebook, Google or OpenID, and enable those services to certify it's you. One of the most successful tech companies out there who never comes up in this conversation is Apple, and it's incredible to think how easily they could have converted its army of Mac loyalists (myself included) to "Sign in With Mac", carrying the Apple flag forward as a badge of honor. More than a decade after getting my .Mac e-mail account (and later signing up my wife to do the same), I am splitting my email activity fifty-fifty with GMail and haven't gained much reason on Apple's side to double down on Cupertino.

When Steve Jobs unveiled iTools at MacWorld San Francisco in 2000, one of the primary offerings of the then-free product was an e-mail address ending in Mac.com. Fresh off success with the 1998 launch of iMac, and still a year away from the debut of the iPod, the company still had its most loyal followers "Thinking Different", and sending people messages with my Mac.com account was cool. It told everybody who would get a note from me that I had chosen Apple. Even when I would have to spell out my e-mail address on the phone, I'd always tell people... "M.A.C. As in Macintosh" in case it wasn't obvious.



Steve Jobs Introducing iTools (MWSF 2000)

But for a variety of reasons, the Mac.com address wasn't especially capitalized on. The service, initially free of charge, controversially converted to an annual paid service by 2002, alongside tools such as iDisk and .Mac home pages, and later rebranded as MobileMe in mid-2008, pushing people even further away from the allegiance with Apple but instead to theoretically more personal Me.com address.

When Apple initially made the move away from free Mac.com addresses for all, the message was that the free mail service was being abused, which no doubt cost them money and headaches - on top of costs for iDisk storage. But of course it also decimated the potential audience of users, most of whom already had free email accounts from somewhere else, be it Hotmail, Yahoo, Netscape or their ISP. Using a Mac.com account almost seems like an artifact unless you're a clear Apple loyalist.

In parallel, while Apple put MobileMe/iTools/Mac.com/whatever on the backburner, the company experienced incredible success with the iTunes ecosystem. Every iTunes customer has an Apple ID (or signs in with AOL), and has trusted Apple with their credit card details, as iTunes expanded from its initial offering of music to music videos, TV shows, movies, books, and of course, mobile applications for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. So Apple's effectively sitting on one of the most actively spending user databases in the world, but one that isn't leveraged elsewhere on the Web. There's no "Sign in With Apple" on major sites like the New York Times or CNN. There's no "Sign in With Apple" on Amazon.com or eBay.

The fight for identity relevance between the major players of the Web, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and others is critical, especially as signing in with one's identity brings additional privileges. Signing in with Facebook brings you your social graph and their history as you find what articles are popular. Signing in with Google is starting to bear fruit with their +1 initiative, but it's early days. Signing in with Twitter gives you the option to follow people on downstream sites if they have Twitter @Anywhere installed. But Apple's not playing in a place where they absolutely could have an impact.

Much has been made of Apple's perceived struggles when it comes to Web services. Those of us who have been watching Apple seemingly forever recall the false start of iReviews, where people could review Web sites on the Internet, the aborted launch of iCards for greeting cards through iTools, the lukewarm approach to .Mac Home pages, and the constant renaming of the email service. This is by no means discounting their fantastic success in hardware and some software, but they could be my identity. I, and many others like me, at one time and even today, want to tell the world we are Mac people, and we could sign in with Apple. But we aren't.

With iCloud to be presented at WWDC this next week, we're moving even further away from the naming of .Mac and what it meant to be a Mac person, especially if this product suite gets its fourth name in a decade or so. No doubt they'll keep shipping some great stuff, but even we Mac people are going to sign in with somebody else all around the Web.

Over the last few years, I have enjoyed watching new sites spring up built around conversations and social engagement. These new social networks, be they about friends (Facebook), business colleagues (LinkedIn or Brazen Careerist), shared interests (MyLikes), shared items (Google Buzz and FriendFeed) or even shared purchases (Blippy), are primarily architected around posted items, and various groupings of gestures (likes) and comments. Practically all of the best sites are now following this model to varying degrees. But some are doing a better job than others of alerting you to your being mentioned or pulling new voices into the conversation. I believe that we are on the cusp of even better improvements to connect people across the Web, no matter where they are.

Take, for example, a basic share on Facebook. Today, when a shared item is added to Facebook, you can add a person's name to the item through their own twist on the familiar Twitter address of an "@reply". You can also tag photos or notes with people's IDs and they will be alerted, either by e-mail, or in their message box.


That's a great addition. But if I am making a comment on this entry, I can't refer to anybody in the same way (an @reply), and nor can anybody else. This is the same issue on FriendFeed, where I can copy a connected friend on a native entry, but can't do any kind of @reply to add them after the fact, nor can anybody else.


Two sites that do this very well are Google Buzz and Blippy.

Google Buzz has it set up so you can notify somebody they are being talked about by adding the @ symbol ahead of their e-mail address. For example, you can tag me by writing @[email protected] in the middle of any thread, and it will resolve to something that looks like @Louis Gray. The catch here is that you need to know the individual's e-mail address, have previously messaged them before through GMail, or you have to open up the person's Google Profile and use their username ahead of Gmail.com to get it right. It absolutely works, but is clunky, with too many steps.


Blippy's is the very best I've seen so far. Forget about e-mail addresses. If you want to reference another Blippy user, just enter @ and their ID, and a link is added to their profile. For me, as usual, that's just an @louisgray away. I will get notified you mention me, and no doubt, jump into the conversation, or at least see what you were saying. I used that just today to pull Jason Shellen of Thing Labs into a conversation on Brizzly, and in minutes, he was there.


By using this kind of @reply functionality, it takes out some of the guesswork and overdone ego-searching and vanity-searching from network to network. Just as Twitter has integrated mentions as part of their service, this mention functionality is becoming part of how we communicate - and I think we're about to see this taken up a notch thanks to two movements - one being WebFinger and the second being Twitter's @anywhere platform, even if it's not the goal right away for the latter service.

WebFinger is essentially supposed to leverage your e-mail address to aid in providing one true identity that is yours, across the Web. Google Buzz leverages WebFinger to tie back your mentions to your GMail account. If more services were to leverage WebFinger, I could tag your "true identity" in a comment, a blog post, a tweet, a photo, or practically anything else, and there would be no ambiguity in terms of whether I meant you or another person with your name (just like the easy confusion between Louis Gray, tech geek blogger and Louis Gray, Osage Indian senator). The open standard, being promoted by Google engineers, and some others, leverages public profile data to be made complete.

Meanwhile, Twitter's @Anywhere platform is looking to put a thin skin of Twitter on top of some major partner sites, at least at first, letting you follow people from 3rd party sites or let you perform Twitter-related actions outside of Twitter.com. I can see a future where this functionality could in theory be embedded as part of major Web browsers, or via plugins, or on enough sites whereby my mentioning of @ and then your Twitter ID would tie back to your Twitter account. Once that gets turned on, you can forget about just counting @replies and @mentions on Twitter.com, and you would instead get, for example, 2 @mentions from ESPN.com, 3 @mentions from The Huffington Post and 1 @mention on TechCrunch. At this point, Twitter's @anywhere could become the @mention and @reply engine for entire Web.

Any good social media maven knows the best ways to search for their own mentions and see if people are talking about them or linking to their content across the Web. I get real-time notifications if I get mentioned on BackType, and I use IceRocket to see links from around the Web or mentions on Twitter. Google News and Blog alerts still work, even if they seem stale. And yes, Technorati is still alive. But if more sites leveraged the kind of @mention and @reply functionality in a great way, as Blippy and Buzz are starting, and Twitter and WebFinger are promising, we could have an even better, more connected, more participatory Web without demanding constant searching. I'm ready.

Are you ready to see this work, @chrismessina @dewitt @ev @biz @scobleizer @parislemon @kevinrose @paultoo @btaylor @finkd @elatable @daveman692 and @pud?

By Ken Stewart of ChangeForge (Twitter/FriendFeed)

With the proliferation of so many social media services, identity management has become a full time job. What sites do I participate in? What sites do I stake my claim so someone doesn’t swipe my name?

DandyID just announced their new automated identity mining service, ClaimMyName, allowing you to select your vanity ID and up to 3 alternates to search across all of DandyID’s listed services. Choose to purchase a Starter Pack allowing you to choose 20 services or opt for the Pro Pack with 300 services. The automated engine will run behind the scenes and send you a digest e-mail within 3 business days.

Watch as Sara demonstrates how it works:


The Starter Pack starts at a robust $79.99, and may well be worth it for those seriously interested in protecting their brand across most of the major social media services. For those who live and die by use of their name, the Pro Pack has been made available at $699.99, or just over $2.00 per service.

Clearly the equation here is whether the time it would take the serious social media maven to manually and individually sign up for each service would be worth this entry fee. As the world of social media matures, more and more services will have to turn to various for-pay models. However, with so many social media services having trained their legions of users that free is the admission price, even the starter pack will seem a steep price, in my opinion.

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Ken Stewart’s website, ChangeForge, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology in an information-centric world. He is always interested in connecting; To discover the many ways you may connect with him, visit him at DandyID.

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