Do You Take This Profile Name…Till Death Do You Part?
Author: Katie
Tonight is the night (at 9:01pm). We can all finally pick out a Facebook profile name to make an easy to remember URL. Oh the joy – we can finally print it on business cards, put it in our email signature lines and more!
Amidst all the excitement and pledges to logon at 9:01 exactly to get the most sought after common names first, Facebook issued a warning to be careful what name you pick because – you’re stuck with it FOREVER.
When I first saw that; I dismissed it. My name really isn’t that common. I found one other Katie Van Domelen on Myspace back in high school, so I guess it’s a race between me and her. Then I started to think about it a little harder. I plan to get married one day; will I then wish I’d picked a different name? And what about my friend Lacey? She’s currently engaged and I wonder if she’ll pick her maiden name or her soon-to-be married name? Is that bad luck? What if someone is married now and they use that last name in their URL but then they get divorced- could become a pretty big thorn in their side. On the other hand, who’s going to insist on using a maiden name in case they get divorced? That has to be bad luck.
The more I thought about this the more it bothered me. I won’t pretend to understand all the technical issues that go into this and I definitely realize that making it permanent might make it easier to keep things straight (Myspace’s URLs are permanent as well.) But I know other networks have found a way to make change possible. LinkedIn, Google Profiles, Twitter, and Friendfeed all let you easily update your name/username and URL. Some even include a space for a maiden name to make searching easy.
Am I being overly sensitive to think that a social network should take into consideration that roughly 50% of the population will experience at least one name change in their life? Or is this another one of those things that we, as women, will just have to adjust ourselves to?
I’ll probably follow in the footsteps I’ve seen other women take on Facebook – keeping their maiden name on their profile in addition to their taken name (i.e: Jane Smith Brown) or simply using their maiden name for social networking purposes. So I plan to sign up for katie.vandomelen to create my Facebook URL (no one take it!) what will you do?
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I have struggled with the EXACT same issue all day – I can’t decide which vanity URL to go for, as I am engaged. My maiden name is what my personal brand has been built upon. And unfortunately, I have already gone through the hassle of getting divorced many years ago, and stupidly used my married name at the time for my MySpace URL, which was most definitely a thorn in my side until the day I abandoned MySpace altogether. I wrote multiple letters to MySpace explaining the situation, but as you said, it’s just another challenge that women are exclusively forced to deal with in the business world. I never got a response.
Your article hits on every single detail of what thought process we have to go through in deciding what to use, and I think it will just have to be a last minute decision – or maybe the land-grabbing will take some options out of play to make up my mind for me.
I struggled with this for every online registration or name choosing during my two year limbo period they call engagement. Now I am in the habit of using the same name for everything – alisonrose. First and middle. THAT I am almost certain will never change. I’m not one for jinxing things.