Monday, November 10, 2008

Consolidating my Online Identity

After much frustration these past years trying to remember which account goes with which login identity, I recently made a determined effort to consolidate my online identity. Now, every account has the same identity 'wmclaxton', rather than some hyphenated or reverse order version of my name. Consider the elegance of this:



Not easy for everyone, I know. How do you find a unique name suitable for all the services? Lucky I guess - I managed to find a rather unique way to signify my name that no one else seems to be using (for now). W and M are my first and middle initials, and together they are a short form for William.

Did I lose anything? Not really. It was a challenge to migrate some of the identities (notably Flickr), and Facebook still requires an account ID as part of the URL. I had to export my Skype contacts and lost the groups when re-importing them. I orphaned some photo sets on Flickr, and had to re-invite my Flickr contacts. Google, Skype, Twitter and Linked In were a breeze.

Plaxo and Google have tried to offer consolidated identity management, but I've never trusted Plaxo, and hey - this approach works for me. My social network is now just a bit easier to manage.


1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Anyone interested in something like this should look into the myOneLogin service-- http://www.myonelogin.com/ Here, users get to log in ONCE with a credential stronger than just a username/ password, and then have sso to other applications all over the web.