What’s In A (User) Name? Facebook’s contribution to online dispute creation

by Chris Peterson and Ethan Katsh

Generating a dispute online takes little effort. Any environment in which there is a great deal of activity, large numbers of transactions and many new and novel kinds of relationships will never be a completely harmonious environment. Some conflict is inevitable.

Creating large numbers of disputes overnight, on the other hand, takes some effort. We shall see in the next few weeks whether Facebook has given us a lesson in how to generate large numbers of disputes and whether a new initiative will create enough negative publicity that it might be forced to reconsider.

Facebook has approximately 200 million registered users. Each user has a profile (or, if the “user” is a corporate person, brand, or business, a “page”). Profiles function much like homepages once did: users create their digital identities by posting personal information, such as musical interests, contact information, pictures, and video. Additionally, profiles are interactive, such that users converse through comments posted to each other’s profiles.
Unlike traditional homepages, however, Facebook’s original purpose was to help likeminded students to meet each other, not to help them craft and present a public face to the world. Since Facebook was navigated through links and not URLs, its designers focused on function rather than form, and so a Facebook profile’s URL might look like http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1326450026&ref=ts

This isn’t something that is easy to put on a business card or use in other ways that might be convenient. No one self-identifies as a long string of numbers. So Facebook, in an attempt to
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