Thinking about the merits of Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect as ways to provide one single online identity for whichever sites you interact with, I realised how hard it can be to find me.
Sure, my two blogs are reasonably well known, I’ve got a reasonable reputation for both my real name and my pseudonym, and all of them are findable via a quick search.
But so many sites still use email addresses as a means of locating people.
A quick total reveals.
1 work email address
1 personal email address on gmail
1 personal hotmail address
1 email address I use for sites involving payments
3 online email addresses I no longer really use, but check occasionaly
1 email address which I use for sites which I’m signing up for and want to filter out before they reach my inbox in case of trust and spam.
So that’s 8 possibilities, plus a few others I’ve used for other projects. And I know I’m more geeky than the average human/internet user/person who doesn’t spend hours on Twitter – but the route I’ve taken to get here hasn’t been particularly unusual. So perhaps finding people by email is becoming less and less practical?
Hi Dan, finding you by a particular email is getting tougher, granted, but every site you’ve ever registered with uses email to find whatever aspect of yourself you felt like revealing, I guess.
Do you have one email address which pings you alerts about your blogs, twitter, social networks etc – in other words a hub for your (personal rather than business) social graph?
I know I do.
Hi Dan, finding you by a particular email is getting tougher, granted, but every site you’ve ever registered with uses email to find whatever aspect of yourself you felt like revealing, I guess.
Do you have one email address which pings you alerts about your blogs, twitter, social networks etc – in other words a hub for your (personal rather than business) social graph?
I know I do.