When the .name top-level domain name became available, I thought that I would make use of it for all my online identity needs for the rest of my life, so I purchased the savas.parastatidis.name domain. My personal email has been savas@parastatidis.name since then while my web/blog presence is located at http://savas.parastatidis.name. After a change in policy, I was allowed to own parastatidis.name so that my entire family can have personal emails, even though they are not taking advantage of the feature yet. The transition was not without pain.
In July, the .me top-level domain name came into existence. I liked the idea a lot and purchased “savas.me”. Given the difficulties that people have with my last name, I thought that moving my online identity to “savas.me” might make sense. But this means changing everything again (Windows Live ID, blog, feeds, web, email, etc.). So, do I go through the process again? Should I change the promise I made to myself that I will have only one permanent online identity and keep it throughout my life?
The thought is to move my web/blog sites to http://savas.me and running http://savas.parastatidis.name in parallel. As for email, the me@savas.me looks easy and short. What do people think?
If only there was a global semantics processing system that would have allowed me to introduce the following piece of knowledge into the global hive of information facts:
savas@parastatidis.name is also known as me@savas.me (digitally signed by ‘savas’)
I know we can do it with RDF but the problem is that we don’t have something like DNS allowing us to introduce such a statement and make everyone aware of it. Then again, the last part (i.e. “digitally signed by ‘savas’”) also requires a permanent certificate (or at least another chain of certificates that will ultimately lead to ‘savas’, the person).
All very interesting issues that I am sure people in the security, online identity, semantics domains have been considering for years. The question on whether to transition to “savas.me” though still exists.
One response to “My online identity… change it or keep the current one?”
Personally I don’t like email addresses where the prefix is something like ‘me’ or ’email’ as when typing it into the mail application I don’t think of starting with ‘me’, I think of starting with ‘savas’. Not all mail apps search your previous recipients full text but of course that’s something that might change in the future.
Also, semantically, I’m not emailing me@savas.me as that would imply that I’m sending an email to myself at the savas domain.
Si.