The Paucity of Names

This is not about the names that our parents gave us. This is about the names we choose to use to login and display on the numerous website that have become a part of our online life.

I remember when emailing was considered as doing something cutting-edge, there was a mad rush of people trying to create email ids with their names. When I joined the bandwagon, even with a unique name like mine, I had to contend myself with stupid numerics added after my name (suggested by the website). After that Gmail came along and suddenly I found that I was the first person amongst the same named people to create an account. My joy was boundless. I had finally got an email address with just my name in it. That's the reason I even rejected the [dot] in between the first name and last name that Gmail suggested.

Then, why am I writing this. Well just scroll your eyes at the hyperlink you are at and you will know. The time I decided I wanted to write a blog I searched for BlogSpot and went about creating an account. It says on the website "It’s easy, and only takes a minute."

It took me 45 minutes just to get to the page where I could start writing. The reason being, I got stuck at the textbox that said "Blog Address (URL)". This is the textbox where you create the link to the blog you are going to write and involves suggesting a name after which [dot] blogspot [dot] com will be appended.

I obviously started from my name, then my last name, my short name, my 'friends call me' name... After exhausting that list and clicking "Check Availability" each time, I moved to generic things like ‘dreams’, ‘life’, ‘confused’... After a few more minutes, their synonyms and antonyms... Then to the items in my house, ‘curtains’, ‘windows’...

After about 43 minutes, all this enormous neural activity made my stomach grumble, which led to, me going to the refrigerator and taking out Choco M&Ms to munch.

Trust me I felt like Archimedes and screamed Eureka!

All this made me realize that as we move towards a world where the internet is spreading to an ever increasing number of people... how would the internet techies solve the problem of paucity of names?

Because in the end, a name is the starting point on the internet. Maybe they have to do something like what they did with the IP addresses (for the non-geeks, google "IPv4" and "IPv6"). But then this was possible because IP addresses were essentially numbers. Names are not numbers and you have no way of knowing what the next person born in the world will be named.

Till that time comes I guess people will be noticing things around them to use them as their online names. Well noticing is not all that bad... 

P.S. Some of you may have noticed that my link is “chocomnms” and not “chocom&ms”. Well as I found out after 44 minutes, BlogSpot doesn’t let you enter special characters except for '-' It took me another minute to replace '&' with 'n'. Oh maybe the BlogSpot website was talking about this one minute only...