What a Dead Man Named FM-2030 can tell us about the future of user names

http://mcdowall.info//posts/what-a-dead-man-named-fm-2030-can-tell-us-about-the-future-of-user-names

by MrMcDowall • 14 years ago

63 52 14 years ago

Of course, the obligatory article about programmers and names must be linked to here: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

MrMcDowall7• 14 years ago

Thanks for reminding me of this!

WayneDB5• 14 years ago

That article seems like a bunch of useless pedantry to me.

"...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.

dwb• 14 years ago

It's not pedantry when a significant proportion of people on Earth are affected by at least one of these falsehoods.

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.

BerislavLopac7• 14 years ago

The point of that article is not to define any definite solution; it's just to remind the programmers that there is a nonzero number of cases when any of the assumptions on the list (and any that are missing) will be wrong. Of course that one should cover most and not all cases, but they should be flexible enough to anticipate a surprise of that kind.

antidoh7• 14 years ago

I have a one-word legal name.

Some people have two, three or more names.

Now what?

webjprgm2• 14 years ago

What you need is to separate components of a name that can be used separately. If your app wants to say "Welcome John" in some places and "How can I help you Mr. Smith" in others, you need to have FirstName and LastName fields. If you also want to say "Account details for John A. Smith" then you need another FullName field.

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.

roc2• 14 years ago

> "Future generations are going to find it impossible to register themselves on social networks with their actual birth names, because older generations have used them all."

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.

MrMcDowall7• 14 years ago

In regard to your first point, yes of course they can handle multiple equivalent names for display, but if you want to use Facebook as your Identity, then there can be only one.

The person at http://www.facebook.com/john.mcdowall is not me, nor is john.mcdowall1 and so on.

BerislavLopac7• 14 years ago

So? Why don't you simply use your phone number, nobody else has the same one as you. Why would identity be restricted to names?

roc2• 14 years ago

And yet whenever any one of your "friends" sees or references your identity, it's displayed and interacted with as simply "John McDowall" or, more likely, "John".

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.

Tichy• 14 years ago

I actually find that interesting. Why can't we change our names at will? Is it because government needs them as a unique ID (combined with birth date and what not)? If governments had other IDs (and they do have social security numbers), why bother keeping track of names?

MrMcDowall7• 14 years ago

I think mostly it is because of the legal status that names convey - contracts can only reference tangible names for people or organizations in them, not abstract concepts. So I guess it's not the Government who would and do happily use SSNs to identify us, but the legal system.

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

IANAL, but I believe that in the United States you're free to use whatever name you like so long as it's not done for fraudulent purposes.

antidoh7• 14 years ago

Essentially true.

drzaiusapelord• 14 years ago

Sure you can. When I worked at a large non-profit we had a name change request from our affiliate members for a user named "Jack." That's right. Just Jack. He said that was his legal name. In Active Directory or LDAP, names (or lack of) are just attributes.

So I just put 'First Name: Jack' and give him 'jack' as his username.

cookingrobot• 14 years ago

> "How would you process a credit card payment for someone who has only one name?" The Sripe API doesn't require a name at all, so they're clearly ahead of the curve here!

MrMcDowall7• 14 years ago

Yeah, Stripe doing it like a Boss :)

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.

adolph• 14 years ago

Name information has been optional for PayFlow since the olden days (Signio I think), so there isn't much of a curve to be ahead.

Pg 27: https://cms.paypal.com/cms_content/CA/en_US/files/developer/...

nzealand• 14 years ago

I worked with a guy called "Comet." That was his full legal name. He logged a bug against the HR system, because it insisted on both a first name and a last name.

dickfickling• 14 years ago

Just a note for the author of this piece - FM-2030 played in the Olympics in 1948, not 1984.

MrMcDowall7• 14 years ago

Whoops! Thanks :) That really would have been Transhuman...

mephi5t0• 14 years ago

How's that new? What about Seal, Madonna and Louis C.K.? Programmers should already handle that. Handling 1 name instead of 2 is a lot easier than let say change your system because instead 2 now you need 5 because people decided to have 3 middle names. Running out of IPs and upgrading Internet to 2.0 version sounds more complex than shrinking names from 2 to 1 IMHO. is it enough for a specific situation (security, verification, banking, etc.)? Probably not. But I am sure there will be plenty fo ways to do so. Every other man in China is Li or Lee and they somehow managed to deal with it :)

antidoh7• 14 years ago

"Programmers should already handle that."

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.

coditor• 14 years ago

I bet you have fun with the TSA.

pixl97• 14 years ago

My name is "Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;--"

https://xkcd.com/327/

What a Dead Man Named FM-2030 can tell us about the future of user names

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