Identity Referencing With ‘@’ On Social Networks: Unexpected Outcomes

Recently I have taken to using blip.fm a lot, posting up songs that I enjoy so that the world (i.e. my social-networking sphere) may enjoy along with me. With disregard to your opinion on such behavior, this note describes a somewhat unusual outcome of this kind of activity.

What blip.fm offers you is the ability to cross-post your musical selections across social networking sites that you may indulge in. I am sure you have already seen such postings of mine, on Facebook and Twitter, featuring laudable performances by such acts as ‘Boney M’ or ‘Lee Majors (The Unknown Stuntman)’.

Normally, this would not be remarkable. This is what the world is doing these days, after all, in terms of user-broadcasted content (in lieu of user-generated content). The unexpected outcome I experienced, however, formed as a result of two social networks that utilize the ‘@’ symbol for identity references within their own messaging systems, and then begin interacting with each other.

What happened is this (real Twitter or blip.fm identities withheld for privacy): I ‘blipped’ a song on blip.fm, attaching the following note: “@thisgirlmyfriend ‘that boy needs therapy!’” (the song here was ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’ by The Avalanches). My aim here was to reference the identity of this girl who is my friend, and a DJ, on blip.fm, so that my message (‘that boy needs therapy!’) would be delivered to her blip.fm account.

So far so good. But then remember, I also have blip.fm set to send out messages to my Facebook and Twitter accounts. Twitter uses the same identity referencing method (‘@’ symbol followed by username) within its own messaging system. So my message: “@thisgirlmyfriend ‘that boy needs therapy!’” was also tweeted on Twitter. This would be okay if this girl who is my friend had an account on Twitter named ‘thisgirlmyfriend’. Hell, it would even be fine if the account ‘thisgirlmyfriend’ didn’t even exist on Twitter.

But the account does exist — only, it belongs to a different girl who is not the same girl on blip.fm that is my friend. ‘thisgirlmyfriend’ on Twitter is a completely different person, who lives in Australia. I was surprised when I was sent a tweet from ‘thisgirlmyfriend’ (on Twitter) saying “hi! Saw the link you sent… frontier psychiatrist. Interesting =)”, since as far as I knew, ‘thisgirlmyfriend’ was from the US.

Eventually, I caught on to what had happened (some people may have caught on earlier because of the different profile info, but my judgement was cataracted by my long exposure to social application development and the knowledge that online profiles are not necessarily always ‘real’).

Anyway, nothing really bad came out of this particular incident. ‘thisgirlmyfriend’ on Twitter (who was not the friend I had targeted my message at on blip.fm) fortunately liked the music, and is now my friend on Twitter. This turned out to be an unexpected, yet amicable incident.

In future posts, I will explore how this referencing of identity with ‘@’ can have more serious implications when employed across social networks.

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