> We turned to KnowEm.com, a website I often rely on to search for usernames, even though the site is primarily intended as a brand registration service. We certainly had a front-runner for her name, but we would have chosen something different if the KnowEm results produced limited availability or if we found negative content associated with our selection.
> With her name decided, we spent several hours registering her URL and a vast array of social media sites. All of that tied back to a single email account, which would act as a primary access key. We listed my permanent email address as a secondary -- just as you'd fill out financial paperwork for a minor at a bank. We built a password management system for her to store all of her login information.
> On the day of her birth, our daughter already had accounts at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even Github. And to this day, we’ve never posted any content.
While I can definitely understand the sentiment and have thought about doing similar things, seeing it all laid out like this seems very strange.
1) Is your twitter/gmail username really that important? Is this sort of personal pre-SEO really that much of an issue? And if it is, won't that just put enormous pressure on new services every generation as people want the slate (username and searchability) wiped clean for themselves?
2) Shouldn't setting all of this up be something your kid eventually does (or that you help them do)? Isn't the presumption that your kid wants a Facebook and Github account a pretty specific one?
Exactly. This article is a great compliment to the discussion yesterday about how society is increasingly risk-averse. This seems like a crazy amount of parental effort to resist what will seem like totally banal cultural norms to their daughter.
Fast forward twenty years on her Github account - I think I would get an odd impression of her if I saw "Joined on [the day she was born]". Same goes for any site that prominently displays the sign up date as a badge of honor...
I wonder how many of these sites will still exist in 10-16 years time. Will gmail still be running? Will it be the goto email provider?
The thing that is most bizarre is they care so much about protecting the kids online identity yet they registered real names. What if the kid wants to use an alias? I find it all a bit odd.
I completely get keeping pictures off of facebook. This setting up a virtual identity.. its weird.
> With her name decided, we spent several hours registering her URL and a vast array of social media sites. All of that tied back to a single email account, which would act as a primary access key. We listed my permanent email address as a secondary -- just as you'd fill out financial paperwork for a minor at a bank. We built a password management system for her to store all of her login information.
> On the day of her birth, our daughter already had accounts at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even Github. And to this day, we’ve never posted any content.
While I can definitely understand the sentiment and have thought about doing similar things, seeing it all laid out like this seems very strange.
1) Is your twitter/gmail username really that important? Is this sort of personal pre-SEO really that much of an issue? And if it is, won't that just put enormous pressure on new services every generation as people want the slate (username and searchability) wiped clean for themselves?
2) Shouldn't setting all of this up be something your kid eventually does (or that you help them do)? Isn't the presumption that your kid wants a Facebook and Github account a pretty specific one?