Securing your online identity

In this day and age, where many of us spend a large part of our professional and social life online our online identity is becoming as important as our real life persona.

The most important part of this online presence, not unlike in real life, is your name. A secondary element is your avatar or profile image.

Most of us (including me) have multiple online names that are reminders of our earlier online personalities when we weren't putting too much strategic thought into registering a hotmail or msn name. Some of the names are our childhood nicknames, funny names we just came up with or simply a combination of our names combined with a serial number. Our name on msn is different from our name on skype and again different from our username here on creativebits for example. This is of course not ideal, because of many reasons.

First, it's harder for your contacts to remember them, but this can be solved by creating a central page where all your contact info is collected. Secondly, and most importantly, a unified branding for your online persona helps others recognize you in different spaces. With a little planning you can harmonize all your various identities for a future where online identities will be even more important than today.

Ideally you should implement one consistent online name that can be used across many different platforms. It's best if your online name is the same as your offline name, but you may find it necessary to make them different for certain reasons. You may also decide to use a different name for your business presence and your personal communications. Generally the higher the consistency you can achieve the better.

Come up with an online name that is unique and short. Everything that applies to choosing a good domain or a company name applies here as well.

Once you have your unique name, make sure to register it everywhere. Here is a list of current services that you need to own with your name. Please feel free to add your suggestions to this list in comments:

1. Domain name. Register as many top level domains for your name as your can afford, but the availability of .com is a key. Head over to godaddy.com and try to get it now.
2. twitter name. With mainstream media talking about twitter all the time, names are going very fast. Even the most unlikely names are taken. Regardless if you want to start twittering or not, you should secure it for future use. Make sure to post a tweet once a month or so to make it look like it's being used otherwise twitter may repossess your name and give it to somebody who wants to be active.
3. GMail, Yahoo, msn and other free email services. Again, regardless if you will use them or not get . Get them and redirect them all to a central email address that you check frequently.
4. With these accounts come a whole range of different services such as GTalk or Yahoo Messanger, etc. You may want to set up a messaging application that can handle all these multiple accounts, such as Adium.
5. Skype name. Skype is pretty much arriving to a tipping point (with Skype available on the iPhone and Blackberry) and it will take over regular phones and will become the standard in voice communication, especially in business.
6. Names on social networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and others are also important and need to be consistent with your other accounts.
7. Names on other web services, such as YouTube (which comes with a google account), Flickr (part of Yahoo), digg, and others.
8. Names on forums and blogs requiring registration and providing profiles, such as creativebits and other sites that fit into your area of interest. This can be several dozen sites.
9. If a site allows, use an open id account, so you have less accounts to update (we will have this option on creativebits too).
10. Finally use a .tel, friends call me or other service that collects all your online identities into one page that you and your friends can refer to in case there are inconsistencies in naming of your different accounts.

While it's less important than the name, it's best to have your avatar to be consistent as well, so people can recognize you easier. Your avatar should reflect your personality and it should be something recognizable and unique. I feel it's worth spending time and money on getting your perfect shoot to be used on dozens of services seen by literally thousands of people over the years. The cool thing about a great avatar is that you never have a bad hair day on Facebook with it.

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