2009-06-25 Internet Nicknames

My “Internet” name – my online presence practically everywhere – is Kensanata. Sometimes I think it’s an age thing. I belong to a generation of people who picked cool names when they first got online, back when the web was young. Later, as the namespaces got crowded, we started seing a lot of firstnames followed by numbers such as birth years resulting in lots of 70s and 80s... But no alex73 for me! These days, with tons of ordinary people online that don’t know about IRC, MUSHes and MUDs, Geocities (which is about to shut doors!), or AIM, picking fancy names seems to be out. There was the rise of ICQ, MSN Messenger, GTalk, and when I look around at our company I see that GTalk is the most popular Instant Messaging service, and that most people have “serious” names consisting of a combination of first name, last name, and optionally the company name.

Kensanata

IRC

MUSH

MUD

Geocities

AIM

ICQ

MSN Messenger

GTalk

I think I’m showing my age by continuing to claim “kensanata” for myself. Oh well.

​#Internet

Comments

(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)

Agreed. It’s definitely an age thing :D

Mind you, I’d much rather be known as Greywulf than robinstacey2344 or some other such unimaginative combination of names and numbers. Ugh.

– greywulf 2009-06-25 23:36 UTC

greywulf