For nearly all of my publicly-facing online identities, my name is the handle. Consider, for example, Flickr and X, which I joined in October 2005 and December 2006 (when Twitter), respectively. I set up Facebook in October 2006, long before the service allowed anyone to choose a handle.
On June 13, 2009, at 12:01 a.m. EST, Facebook opened up the landgrab to claim a personalized username. That worked out to 9:01 p.m. on the 12th for we Westcoasters. Unfortunately, I was nowhere near a computer, waiting with our daughter for her flight from Long Beach, Calif. to one of three major Washington, D.C.-area airports (I don’t recall which).
Earlier that day, I received Nokia N97, one of the most-advanced smartphones of the time and easily from feature and function perspectives far superior to iPhone 3G and 3Gs. I made the SIM switch from Apple, or thought so, but found myself at the airport without Internet access.
I can attest from experience frequently changing phones (to review them) switching from iPhone to anything always ended in a customer support call, regardless of the carrier. At that time, Apple devices used different provisioning that needed to be disabled for functions like voicemail to work on other smartphones. In this case, I couldn’t access the data network.
By the time I could get on Facebook—the next afternoon—joewilcox was taken. The current possessor is a married, gay Guy who calls himself QueerJoe. Based on looking over his Facebook page, we don’t share the same gender preferences and not really political perspectives, either. But we’re close in age, which is an odd coincidence. We were born a year and couple months apart (I am the older of us).
So, why isn’t my name my Facebook handle? I was at the wrong place at the wrong time without the right data connectivity. The username land grab was first come, first serve; I was too late.
Let’s talk Featured Image, which is the first photo taken with the N97 on this day in 2009. Vitals: f/2.8, ISO 100, 1/160 sec, 5.4mm; 7:11 p.m. PDT Our daughter holds another Nokia phone that tucked into a closet somewhere.