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The One-Name Email, a Silicon Valley Status Symbol, Is Wreaking Havoc (wsj.com) 255

Posted by msmash from the there-can-be-only-one dept.
In Silicon Valley, first-name-only email addresses have long been the ultimate status symbol, indicating a techie was an early hire at a new company. Now that startups are growing, the one-namers are wreaking havoc -- and the competition to snag them is fierce. From a report on WSJ: When Peter Szabo heard he and his co-workers would receive new email addresses after his tech company was launched from an incubator, he ran to his boss and confirmed he would get the "Peter" first-name email address. After years of failing to arrive at companies early enough to bag the prized address, Mr. Szabo negotiated getting the single-name email at the earliest opportunity. "As companies get bigger, if you can be the original Peter, absolutely that's bragging rights," said Mr. Szabo, who is chief revenue officer of mobile-entertainment network startup Mammoth Media. "It's huge."

[...] Startups are growing faster than at any time since the dot-com boom thanks to a flood of venture capital. The system of using first names is leading to more email misfires at tech companies the more successful, and larger, they get. {...] Even techies are having a hard time figuring out how to disrupt the naming convention of corporate email. The growing pains usually set in when startups reach 25 to 50 employees, as names begin to overlap, according to Josh Walter, who has designed email services for companies for the past eight years. "That's when companies say, 'Oh no, what do we do now?'" Mr. Walter says. He is currently IT engineer at Second Measure, a Silicon Valley startup that analyzes consumer spending.
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The One-Name Email, a Silicon Valley Status Symbol, Is Wreaking Havoc More

The One-Name Email, a Silicon Valley Status Symbol, Is Wreaking Havoc

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  • First World Problems (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 10, 2018 @04:03PM (#56761094)

    i just can't even.....

    • "As companies get bigger, if you can be the original Peter, absolutely that's bragging rights," said Mr. Szabo, who is chief revenue officer of mobile-entertainment network startup Mammoth Media. "It's huge."

      Hey. Instead of their email address, other guys get to brag about the size of their penis. Let... Peter... have... this.

    • I guess this is the modern day equivalent of the corner office.

      When I was young I got one of those (corner locations) and thought it was the schizzle. Turns out the big pillar running through it made the space much less usable and nobody cared anyway.

    • Re:First World Problems (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Sunday June 10, 2018 @04:50PM (#56761278) Homepage Journal

      Nice try but I'll take more money over a single name email address. Fake perks don't count.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Xest ( 935314 )

        Right, I've never read such drivel in my life:

        "said Mr. Szabo, who is chief revenue officer of mobile-entertainment network startup Mammoth Media. "It's huge.""

        I guess "ChiefBollocksOfficer@CompanyNoOneHasEverFuckingHeardOf.penis" was already taken?

        It's huge, having a first name e-mail address at an irrelevant fucking startup? Really? If it's huge I can guarantee you I can get myself 10 by the end of the week. Does that qualify me to run Google nowadays or something?

        Remind me to note this down as another cr

    • First name problems.

    • If this article isn't facetious, then people are really retarded.

      If you own a domain you can use any e-mail address you want.

      Are people really that retarded? Yes, I believe they probably are.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Megane ( 129182 )

        This is clearly talking about a work e-mail address.

        When you have your own domain, the domain name matters more. I've had a 3-character dot-com domain and also a "cool word" domain (but that one is a dot-net) since 2000, and I've been running them from my own static-IP DSL the entire time. So of course I use my first name for the e-mail address.

        Employee ID numbers can be like this too. I worked for Cisco back in the early 2Ks. They had just changed their employee number system from sequential to a random

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      One name email and a company name of at most three letter are signs of an early era and potential status symbols.

      Also the cryptic short form names can be there - in early mail addresses the short form used for the login was often used for the mail, e.g. anfo@xyz.org or something.

      In a passing period an underscore was used instead of a dot separating first and last name, like john_doe@xyz.org

      And how many has used the bang-paths? The style used when auto-routing mails didn't exist and the users had to know whi

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Askmum ( 1038780 )
      No idea when having your first name as an email became something to brag about, but for me you can only have bragging rights if your name (and connected email) is dmr.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Dumbass (Score:3)

    by registrations_suck ( 1075251 ) on Sunday June 10, 2018 @04:05PM (#56761100)

    You can always request "dumbass" @yourstartup.com. While many may qualify, few will have the honesty to request it.

    • Re:Dumbass (Score:5, Funny)

      by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Sunday June 10, 2018 @09:11PM (#56762410)

      You can always request "dumbass" @yourstartup.com. While many may qualify, few will have the honesty to request it.

      Reminds me of my Boss, a nice Chinese guy named Cho Sun. His email was Chosun@hissite.com

      When we asked him why he chose that address, he replied "Many are called, but few are Cho Sun."

    • I had a friend in the military that was stuck working on their service desk immediately after they stood up a major portal service. When people signed up for a portal account they were automatically assigned an account name based on their first and last name. If there was already an account matching that, then a sequential number was added at the end. One day he fielded a call from an irate O-3 who was incensed that a lowly E-3 had the username he wanted, a username without the number at the end. And of cou

  • Spam (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I had a "first name" email address with a common first name. I changed it pretty quickly as I got deluged with spam.

  • Henceforth, all my new email addresses will be "one-name@..."

  • Dumbest idea (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rojash ( 2567409 ) on Sunday June 10, 2018 @04:14PM (#56761136)
    Single-handedly, and single-namedly, the dumbest ever post I have encountered on /.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pjt33 ( 739471 )

      If I had mod points I would give you +1 insightful. I've worked in companies where I was the first employee with my name, but because they're professional companies (or at least want to appear professional from the outside) my e-mail address has always been some combination of first and last name.

  • I have a 1 letter email address on a 3 letter domain

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by whoda ( 569082 )

      I use a@aol.com for a lot of fake registrations.
      Sorry about that.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        fake registrations

        chuck.u.farley@mouse-potato.com

        Gives their admins something to clean up as well.

    • .biz doesn't count.

    • There is some (recent ?) rule it must be 2 letters. Once I couldn't unsubscribe my 1 letter email address from a commercial mail list because it couldn't be 1 letter. My domain is my first name so a first name address would be lame.

  • I read this story earlier today. The fundamental problem appears to be people who are too lazy to actually look up an email address. They’re pretty much all complaining that “I know a guy named Alex who works at Twitter, so I sent an email to alex@twitter.com but that wasn’t my guy’s address.”

  • ...just hire people named like Major Major Major Major [wikipedia.org].

  • It seems odd that in the days of phone numbers being portable we don't have a portable email identity because there is no addressing system.

    It would be nice to have a decentralized distributed addressing system that allows us to separate our identity from these providers. Multiple mailboxes could be handled by some type of key system that is a layer under the address. Those could even direct to different providers. I could give one key to family members, others to each employer, others to places I shop onli

    • Um, we do. It's called DNS. I assume you've heard of it since you mentioned it in your post.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shess ( 31691 )

      It seems odd that in the days of phone numbers being portable we don't have a portable email identity because there is no addressing system.

      You have a portable phone number, but most companies don't want you handling corporate business on your personal phone number.

      In fact, _I_ don't want to intermix company and personal phone calls or email, either.

      • Perhaps I was unclear in the rest of what I said, but this wouldn't intermix mail.

        Those with keys would go direct to specific inboxes / servers associated with the key. Keys would need to be able to have multiple owners with different rights too so that a company could revoke an employees rights to communications on their behalf.

        What I'm thinking of is more of a personal access control system that would give users full control (sometimes shared with companies / parents) over where they receive communication

  • Back when the Internet was mostly for nerds, the solution to this problem was a finger query away.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dwye ( 1127395 )

      Worked until there were multiple me's on the Internet. I was in the whois database at the end of the era when people still used their real names, and I got emails for someone else with my name every 8 months or so, and supposedly my surname is about the 2800th most popular one in the US.

      Even at AT&T, when I worked there, the only way to disambiguate common names was that the org chart was built into the internal directory pages, so if you knew where or in what division your John Smith worked, or who hi

  • ICQ (Score:2)

    by Bert64 ( 520050 )

    Like people who used to brag about how low their ICQ number was, or how how their slashdot id is etc...

  • OMG this is so stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by shess ( 31691 ) on Sunday June 10, 2018 @05:04PM (#56761344) Homepage

    Having been in a position of having a common first-name email at a company, I will never accept that in the future, even if offered. It results in getting all the emails for all the people with the same first name, plus a bunch of emails from external people who can't get ahold of anyone so they just start randomly spamming likely addresses. In any case, autocomplete supersedes any time-saving advantage it would offer.

    As far as being a "status symbol", that's even worse. If your company is successful, you'll end up spending all of your time trying to avoid projecting status, trying to fade into the background and just be a regular employee to the extent possible. Unless, of course, you're an asshat, in which case you'll glory in your status projection (and hopefully, for the sake of your co-workers, be let go).

    • Re:OMG this is so stupid. (Score:5, Funny)

      by voislav98 ( 1004117 ) on Sunday June 10, 2018 @05:34PM (#56761502)
      First thing we've done after coming into a couple of startups was standardize the email addresses to stop this kind of thing. Everybody gets first.last name email (or something like that), no nicknames, no first names, no choice. Boring and formulaic, but efficient and eliminates confusion and status issues. The only exception is bofh@company.com, reserved for system ops.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dwye ( 1127395 )

        When I was a sysadmin, we set up aliases of first_name "." surname for everybody, and gave people a two week window to request in ID *other* than first initial , last name (i.e., "jsmith" for John Smith) if there wasn't a namespace collision (or too long a name, Slavic and Greek surnames can be annoyingly long :-). Surprisingly, the only ones who commonly wanted their firstname as their ID were unmarried or soon-to-divorce women; men sometimes asked to omit their first initial, though.

        Our company was not i

        • The notion that a woman changes her name upon marriage is by no means universal. In my wife's home country, it's simply unheard of, and it's no longer the default or even common practise in the country where we were married and currently reside. Changing it didn't even occur to either one of us. (And it was the same when I married my ex-wife, who is also not from the US.)

          Every time we visit my family in the US, she gets grilled at passport control over the fact her last name's different from mine. It's been

  • I managed to grab a first-name email address for MIT's alumni email forwarding service, by virtue of randomly happening to be online and checking out the alumni website a few minutes after the service went live. It ends up getting a boatload of spam (apparently one of spammers' algorithms is to blindly send spam to [common name]@[domain]), and misdirected emails intended for other alumni with the same first name. What's even more fun is when one of those alumni signs up for a mailing list website and forg

  • This is what happens ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by johnlcallaway ( 165670 ) on Sunday June 10, 2018 @05:27PM (#56761464)

    ... ... when you hire immature people.

    New rule on my interview list, anyone that shows any serious interest in one-name email address results in the interview being terminated at that point with a "thank you, but you just won't work out".

    And this is why it's important for companies, from day one, to set a sane standard for server names, email addresses, and any other naming convention so they are practical and not 'cute'. And to hire lead people that have actually worked for a living instead of fresh out of a University so they know more things than Universities teach.

    And no, in my 40-year career, I have never named a server after a Star Wars character.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      When my employer started setting up HP-UX engineering workstations, I was the second person to receive one. The first guy came over and said we should name them all with some sort of series. He had named his homer (obviously going for the Simpsons characters). So I named mine ulysses.

      When the NT servers started appearing on our system, I told the admin to name the domain controller sophocles. But he wasn't going to fall for the tragedy joke.

  • Diluting any value Slashdot might still have (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CyberLeader ( 106732 ) on Sunday June 10, 2018 @05:39PM (#56761542) Homepage

    Look, not every article's going to be a winner, especially on a slow Sunday in June. But this is just nuts. What value is there in this article? Worse yet, the source article is behind a WSJ paywall.

    It's not news. It helps nobody. C'mon Slashdot, do better, and pick editors who know the difference between news and not news.

    • What value is there in this article?

      Same value as reading the Daily Mail, it is important to understand how stupid people think as you may inadvertently end up working for one.

  • Single name addresses are no big deal. What's a big status symbol is single-letter addresses; ask Rob Pike, his single-letter address causes "go" afficianados to swoon.

    I tend to go by value of stock options and RSUs, but what do I know, I'm a NYC techie, not a Silicon Valley one.

  • I'm amazed that in this day and age I still have problems going by my first initial and middle name. I have about a 30/70% shot of it being correct at any given time. And so many databases have no provision for middle name, only first name and initial.

    About the only thing that would be more problematic would be to have an Arabic name [wikipedia.org].

    • And so many databases have no provision for middle name, only first name and initial.

      IMHO, a middle-name field doesn't make sense universally, because a lot of people have more than 2 given names. Many people also have only one given name, but some systems might expect something for the middle field anyway. (Cf. address forms that require state/province even for countries that don't have them.)

      For enough flexibility, the system should allow you to write all given names in the first-name field, including reasonable punctuation such as hyphens for compound names and periods for initials. O

  • From the visible first paragraph, I gather that it's something to do with a putative shortage of email addresses on the part of those without the creative imagination it takes to use the full power of a 26-character alphabet to come up with an email handle more memorable than phil179485@gmail.com.

  • I've got (name)@(surname).com should I brag about it?
    I own the domain (surname).com, so all of my family-member have simple e-mail adresses - even the newborns will have!
    Or should I brag about my 2-letter nick here on /. ? ;-)

  • I mean, that Szabo fellow, what is he - like a twelve-year old? For his maturity does not seem to go beyond that. Bragging rights. Really?

  • > he ran to his boss and confirmed he would get the "Peter" first-name email address

    You're a bunch of idiots who have lost your sense of priorities.

    - billg@microsoft.com

  • I@VI
    Put an MX record on a TLD?

    Sure, back in the days when email clients followed strict protocol, before every JS and php jockey scripted in their favorite arbitrary limitations to front ends, count dots and strike odd characters. The days when adding mailbox+anything@ was guaranteed to deliver to mailbox@ ...when you were actually encouraged to place a final trailing dot to your email address to subvert delays from the many "try it as a hostname if it's not final-dotted" resolvers that were out there in u

  • I always get a first name email. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Snufu ( 1049644 ) on Sunday June 10, 2018 @09:50PM (#56762546)

    Sincerely,

    Zz!zyx Smith

  • Can't adapt to technology (Score:3)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Sunday June 10, 2018 @10:21PM (#56762706) Homepage Journal

    Oh no! These first name only email addresses confuse me. I'm new at this and I've only been using email for 25 years. I can't understand how to type in a name or use an address book. derp!

    If silicon valley can't figure out how to email, we're in a lot worse trouble than I thought.

  • Change your name to Zebamrulator and you can get the first name email wherever you go

  • F u, Szabo. "Cornell University has an electrone microscope..." blah blah

  • I'm lucky enough to have myfirstname@email.com. You get lots of free accounts with this... Follow this link to change your password on xyz.com, why thankyou, I think I will!!! ;-)
    Seriously though, why dont these companies ever let me say some one else signed up with my email address so let them change it.

  • This has been a problem since, oh, 1960. ARPANET faced this I'm betting, and of course .MIL. Commercial email certainly faced this damned quick, as AOL in particular was forcing naming conventions in 1992 or before, and Compuserve before that.

    Really, single name addresses are only useful to spammers.

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