(no subject)

[reldnahkram]

So I've started messing around with Trillian's ability to label screen names with real names. I'm not sure how I feel about this. It seems like it's joining the online personality with the real world personality, and past experience has shown that this can be a dangerous thing. I also haven't yet figured out whether to input as first name last name or last name, first name. The latter is superior, I think, for sorting, but makes conversing seem strange, and finding a name on a list a little harder, as I tend to think about talking to people by first name. Hmm...

Comments

[uncleamos]

Eh, on lj I usually use people's real names instead of lj names.

My scheme...

[deathbysnusnu.livejournal.com]

(In Trillian 2, but should still apply.)

I sort people by the nature of my associations with them (contact list at the moment has a folder for Swat friends, a folder for high school friends, and a folder for people I talk to only via the web). I then relabel all of my contacts by the names I identify them with. This generally means that people I know in real life will just have a first or nick name, and maybe sometimes also the first letter of their last name if, say, I knew three Bobs so one of them was "Bob T." (if you're wondering, I don't). With people I meet online, I usually refer to them by nick... not e-mail or AIM or gaming name as much as a variation of that that I call them by.

I generally also keep an "archive" folder for each category where I put people who are on my list but not really people I talk to often... that way I still have their contact info and can see if they're on by just opening that folder, but generally they're tucked away from me so all of my contacts fit into the window without any scrolling. Also a good place to dump your clones of people so that you have their primary contact visible but have access to others if, say, all of AIM/ICQ suddenly goes down and you have to turn to Yahoo! messenger (i.e. the worthless messenger).

Re: My scheme...

[irilyth]

I used to do something like that, with Swat friends, Boston friends, work friends, and poker buddies -- until I started playing poker with Swattie co-workers in Boston.

[wayman.livejournal.com]

I use first names only; it's how I think of people. But I include in the firstname field (of iChat) as a suffix the person's college and graduation year, so I can differentiate most people with duplicate names (e.g., Lauren BMC'01 and Lauren SC'08, Joanna BMC'05 and Joanna SC'05, etc). The only danger is that you may start forgetting people's screennames, which is a problem if you want to IM people but are on a public machine and have to use AIM-Express, e.g.