Tonight Mathew, I'm going to be...

Well that was a pain, creating the new online me. The pressure of thinking of an ID.

It had to be funny, can’t be seen as the boring one.
It has to be unique, can’t be seen as the boring one.
What does it say about me, can’t let on that I’m the boring one.

And then you have to choose a picture. Not draw one or create one from scratch. Pick one from Google images. That’s what it’s for, jobs like this.

I consider myself to have almost all of a finger on the pulse. I am just about the age where I can say ‘I’m down with the kids’ and not look too far off. So why is it that as soon as I started, I felt like my Dad trying to dance? I regularly go on message boards, forums and leave opinions on sites without a problem but this is a whole new ball game.

But that’s because I’m me. I have email addresses as me. Log in names that clearly state who I am. And I post under pretty much the same name as on my birth certificate.

There must be more people like me. People who find it embarrassing or difficult to think of an original and interesting ID. So I had a bit of a look around and I reckon there are two groups of people who look at online ID in completely different ways.

The first group are like me. They have one ID. They don’t have the time or the inclination to set up lots of different user names, IDs, avtars. Or maybe they’re trying to create a consistent online ID so they only need one. One that makes them instantly recognisable. Maybe they need this for professional reasons. Maybe its because they're having conversations across lots of forums where it's important for them to be recognised. Maybe it’s just harder to forget one name and password.

The second are most definitely not like me. They create usernames and IDs like they’re going out of fashion. They forget their Myspace login so are just as likely to set up a new account as they are find the password. It’s all a bit of a game. You have to find a whole new bunch of people to be friends with. They abandon their profiles like a snake shedding its skin, constantly reinventing themselves.

Danah Boyd, an observer of network behaviour noted “many teens are content (if not happy) to start over with most of their accounts” as an online profile is “not seen as something to build an extensive identity around, but something to talk to friends in the moment”.

So if these people are so promiscuous surely it’s pretty hard to find out who they are. How can you reach someone who constantly changes their ID? Trying to track paedophiles online, for example, becomes even more difficult when ID can be changed at the drop of a hat. And if you change your ID so regularly, site stats are a pretty poor measure of success. Second Life for instance quote over 2m users when only 36k of those are paid subscribers and well over 1m haven’t logged on for more than 60 days. Are these people who aren’t logging on just abandoning their profiles and starting again? Or are there users with multiple ID?

Maybe I am just too forgetful to remember more than one set of details. Maybe I can’t be bothered. But it seems that those who have been brought up with the Internet are using it in ways that many of us just don’t get (yet).

Anyway, why do I feel the pressure to make my ID interesting when no one knows who I am?