This is a post IDs: where do they lead … ? by Bill Anderson that is great.

Bill and I were introduced by Jerry Michalski – (sociate) and have had quite a few great conversations over the past year. He did this post in early December that I just found. I though you would enjoy the humor and point he is making.

I’ve been noticing that I’m getting more and more behind on the online identity conversations, implementations, ruminations, and exploitations (?). But I try to keep track of what pops up on the weblogs of Mary Hodder and Kaliya Hamlin, for starters.

I was looking at the acronym “ID” and that triggered the following set of associations:

IDs = identifiers, could even be names, but seem to be more formal, as in “Show me your ID.”

UIDs = unique ones of these ID thingys. These show up sometimes on software modules.

GUIDs = globally unique ID thingys. I’ve seen these being applied to globally identifying species, and again to software (where it’s sometimes spelled UUID).

and this led me to yet another acronym:

FLUIDs = which I’m defining as familiar, famous, or favorite local, unique, identifier thingys. These, I think, are also known as names.

Related posts:

1. I-names conference coming out party
2. i-names work in OpenID logins too
3. i-names in the sphere
4. The workshop on i-names (well described)
5. Why i-names? I think they work for my people.