As consumers have invested more and more time and effort into developing their social networks online, they find that their identity is increasingly tied to their virtual presence on commercial sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Yelp. Where previously one may have set up their own website, or at least fumbled around on GeoCities (RIP), users now increasingly rely on services like Facebook or GMail to act as their ‘home base’ for identity management online. The self-created personal website may be becoming a rarity, replaced by the commercial social network profile page.

Facebook today announced that it would enable users to claim ‘vanity URLs’ that simplify the address of their profile page (for instance, my address could go from http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=34600004 to http://facebook.com/richard.nevins). They are opening the gates for username registration at 12am EST, June 13th and putting the presumably valuable URL’s up in a first-come first-serve basis that is bound to attract the social media equivalent of cyber-squatters (Twitter has seen its share of ‘name squatting‘). Customers in the land grab can choose one username that will remain with their account from that point on (according to FB it cannot be changed, so choose wisely).

While it might be easy to see why people would prefer a vanity URL to the incoherent numeral URLs of the present, there are compelling reasons to balk at this move by Facebook when it comes to identity management. As Marshall Kirkpatrick summarizes: “I don’t need a Facebook vanity URL because I already own MarshallK.com.” While I would echo Kirkpatrick’s suggestion that users should prefer the greater control over their digital identity that operating their own website provides, I suspect that it is one that appeals to fewer and fewer new ‘net users, who are now accustomed to user-friendly pre-fab solutions that require less cost and effort to set up and maintain. They are more likely to prefer to outsource the hosting of their web ‘home base’ (the principle source of their network identity) to a third party like Facebook or even Google.

I see this as a part of the broader trend of removing computing power and applications from local control and sending them off into the cloud. What was once the ‘Personal Computer’ is increasingly becoming the ‘Remote Computer,’ excelling at accessing offshore resources, applications and personal data that is no longer located on your person. The problem with putting all of your data in the cloud is that when you cannot access the cloud, you are cut off from your data. Then you’ve really lost control of your network identity!