In business you have customer account numbers, bank account numbers, membership numbers, invoice numbers etc. There is no conflation with identity - you are not your account with your bank, gym or stationary supplier. It is only because of internet forums and login usernames that we have even gotten to this state of affairs in the first place.
Usernames (or internet aliases in general) were a routinely mocked part of internet culture by mainstream culture. People these days use services in spite of usernames rather than because of them. The president of the united states has 'real' in front of his name. Think about that. In no other medium do we have people asserting that they are the genuine person they are claiming to be. Its tautological.
People weren't just tapping random key combos either. They were coming up with their own identities because that's what people like to do.
I can't believe these comments that think people are itching to be assigned a #Reference ID on the internet. For example, you also think the mainstream used internet message boards.
Everything else you've listed is part of a identification procedure that happens mostly between you and a machine. Not between two humans (taking out the call center semi-human who needs to type that into the machine first).
Depends what's associated with the account, no?
If it's something like Steam, your username might be tied to hundreds of dollars of purchases.
If it's Slashdot, you'll lose your sweet low user ID.
If it's StackOverflow, you'll lose your various reputation scores.
It's also likely that they used the login username as a primary key, which means it's unlikely to be able to be changed anytime soon.
To be honest, given user names are just an arbitrary reference, you could probably also include phone numbers, IP addresses, social security, national insurance and house numbers into the list of prior art as well.
Not that I'm advocating the use of numbers instead of names. Twitter I think gets it right where they give everyone a number which is fixed but you can assign yourself a name; which can change. Most of the time people choose not to, But the option is still there.
> The reality is that a relatively small handful of privileged early adopters get good usernames that match their identities, and everyone else gets screwed. These identifiers then act like tatoos that you got a long time ago and are stuck with for the rest of your life: people end up reminded every day of a sport they can no longer play due to an injury ("hockeystar") or loves lost ("iheartjessie"), attached to a joke that is no longer funny or to a thought that they found adorable as a 13 year old (when you are legally asked to "choose a username": a modern era coming of age scenario) but which adults find inane, or to a nickname that means something different than you realized to some people and now can't change.
The best happy medium is a user name that can change. But so many places make them static (sometimes for reasons no better than they just made "username" the foreign key in their users table)
> I come from the ICQ time
Likewise; that's why I used it as an example ;) I think comparing ICQ to IRC is a bit disingenuous as they occupied slightly different use cases.
Plus at risk of repeating myself, I'm not arguing against users names on the whole; just systems which have user names that cannot be changed
Most users have at least two email addresses because most of their mail is routed through email addresses like "[email protected]" but they don't feel comfortable putting that on job applications and medical forms.
It is a statistical certainty that people have missed job opportunities and subsequently defaulted on mortgages because they sent off a bunch of job applications on their "business" email address and then forgot to check it because they don't use it much.
One of the more common office security failures is to have your email client auto-fill to someones personal account instead of their company-issued account, resulting in sensitive documents leaving the auditable environment of the office email server.
Now for sure, it's not exactly up there with global warming and north korea, but I'm not sure I'd call it a "no-problem". It's a fundamental UX failure that we're only just now starting to see get fixed with email address aliases becoming a more widespread feature, and even that is just a patch. We've all gotten used to it, but that doesn't mean it's not a problem.
I'm/was doing quite a lot IT support for friends, family their friends and so on and have never heard of anything like that. I'm also sure that the domain @hotmail.com would be enough to not get you a job on certain businesses.
> One of the more common office security failures is to have your email client auto-fill to someones personal account instead of their company-issued account
So...you are sending private emails from your business account? Again it's not the nick/names problem. The problem is your behavior. This is the root cause here and doing some make up won't solve your problem.