Happy (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I’ve been noticing a trend over the past few months. I have a lot of friends who are having their first child. Many of these friends, especially the ones who work in the technology space, are reserving and managing the handles, email addresses, and websites of their newborns. They believe that when their child comes of age, the good handles, email addresses, websites, and digital accounts will be much harder to come by. By 2025, Jonathan.Smith@gmail.com or @jonsmith equivalents will definitely not be available. You may have to settle for @jonsmith13 or Jsmith13@gmail.com.
Taking this trend a step further, I’ve recently seen married couples reserve Twitter handles for their unborn children. Yes, for children that aren’t born yet (after hearing this, I’m not embarrassed to admit that I actually locked down a few handles myself). When couples generally agree on a few names, they lock down the Gmail account and Twitter handles for their future kin.
I caught up with a few parents in the tech/startup field to ask them their thoughts on this trend and get their feedback.
Alex Rainert runs product at foursquare, the location-based social network. When his wife, Karen and he had their first child, Elise, they locked down @EliseRainert. Rainert told me, via email, that he mostly did it because “he thought is was funny” and less because he wanted to squat on the handle. The account’s tweets are protected, so Rainert can control who can see what is tweeted from his daughter’s account.
A while back, Rainert registered teamrainert.com for his entire family’s use. He also registered eliserainert.com with his hosting site because he “figured that would be a good one to squirrel away for later.” Rainert isn’t looking to force any of this on his daughter and is realistic that there might be something else that comes up between now and when she’d want control of her digital identity.
Brian Snyder left IBM to start his education startup called Everything Butt Art. Brian, a father to Madeline Snyder, spoke to me via email about this trend. “It’s definitely something interesting to think about. Before responding I was trying to think of something analogous from when I was a kid but have struggled to come up with anything. It is uncharted territory.”
Brian hasn’t pursued reserving any handles for his daughter, but appreciates that some people do. His two cents are that he’d like to leave the decision of choosing her website, email, handle, up to his daughter. “Maybe she doesn’t want to be @madelinesnyder, and would sooner prefer to have some non-name-related association of her choosing, a la @baconseason.”
Brian continued, “Will the unavailability of a 'good one' have a material impact on the outcome of her life? I doubt it. Will it cause inconveniences to her and thus she blames her parents for not locking down her profiles, etc.? Again, I doubt it.”
Brian concluded by saying, “That's not to say that a digital history created before she creates her own is unimportant, because I think it is. However, at this point, I think it can be handle/url agnostic with the naming convention and platform to be determined by the grown child in the future.”
While this trend is interesting, the better question is, how viable is this? Will Twitter, Gmail, and others even be around when my kids are of age?
David Parker, co-founder of Tippt Media, thinks that if there is no cost to locking down a handle or email address, then “why not?” But, Parker, cautions that your taste in names or other circumstances may cause you to change your actual kids’ names by the time they're born. “I never in my wildest dreams thought I'd have kids with names of Stanley and Eleanor,” says Parker.
Joe Rago, the senior mobile product manager at Walgreens, reiterates what Parker said, in regards to his two year old. “Who even knows what will be the Gmail/Twitter, etc. of my daughter's generation? At the end of the day, I am not going to lose any sleep if my daughter doesn't have @firstnamelastname for her Twitter handle and hopefully neither will she.”
Matthew Shadbolt, the Director of Interactive Product & Marketing at The Corcoran Group, has a two year old and has heard of the idea of registering accounts for her to 'futureproof' her online identity. But he hasn’t done it. Shadbolt told me that, “Our view is that by the time she really embraces the web (maybe 5 years away), many of those platforms might be retired, as everyone moves on to something else.”
Danny Boice, the co-founder of a 500 Startups-backed company, Speek, looks at the numbers: “Yes it's worth locking down good handles now. It's simple mathematics: the population is growing and there are a fixed number of good handles/screen names to choose from. The earlier the better if you want something good.”
But perhaps, the funniest response I received when asking for parents’ feedback on this trend, came from Ron Diver, a growth hacker from Seattle. Ron told me that he’s thought of doing this in the past, but has always concluded that the vagaries of the market would make it irrelevant. He concluded by saying, "Hey, you squatted on my AOL screen name. Thanks Mom, you're the best!"
