This is what I see on about a third of all my friend’s profile pages on StudiVZ - the very successful German rip-off of the even more successful Facebook website. What happened?

Apparently my friend has changed his or her name to Ajatollah of Rock’n'Roll and the picture to a low-res copy of a shirt designed by Paul Snowden. So far I have no idea who that is or what message is supposed to be delivered through this action.

The reason why this was done is easy to explain. Long story short: Students set up cool website, everyone goes crazy and signs in, students sell it for millions, investors want to make money and start to advertise and scan the content, now people get angry but still want to use the free services, so they change their names.

Note: I’m even not so sure about the first part in which the cool students set up a website. Maybe there was lots of money involved in the first place? At least I heard the name Samwer in this context.

Anyway, I’d like everyone just for a second think about what happens here. Let’s break this down to the essentials:

A. Why are people starting to obscure their identities? The reason is supposedly that they want to avoid being spied by advertisers. That they want to stay private and share their ideas and communication with their friends alone.

B. How do those nasty people make their money? This is quite obvious. And it is from the marketing point of view the great achievement of a Mark Zuckerberg, that he created a virtual environment in which people are encouraged to make true statements about themselves. I don’t have to explain that to anyone who uses Facebook or StudiVZ or any other of those websites. But it is essentially all about the fact that if I join a group, write a message or upload pictures I do make a statement about what I do or what I like.

So here is where the money is made. With access to all this information I can scan the messages, the group-titles, the profile page, the home university or city, and so on. Based on this information ads can be placed explicitly on those user’s screens who are the target group of the advertiser. Very efficient and as advertisers like to say: it is in the interest of the users, as they only see ads that they actually want to see.

C. Conclusion Changing your name on any social network website will only affect the website’s usability for your friends. The advertisers don’t give a f&%§ about what your name is. As long as you go on using the platform as usual, they will scan your data and provide you with suitable ads. The only way out is canceling your account or at least taking out all personal info, unsubscribing from all groups and avoiding to use the message functionality (which comes quite close to canceling the whole account). The only thing that doesn’t make any sense at all is changing your name.

Here’s the deal: maintaining a complex social network platform in the web costs a lot of money. This money is paid by advertisers. And it is paid for information about the users of such a website. If changing names would cause this system to break down, this would probably already have happened to StudiVZ.

I think it’s ok to give away some information about yourself. Millions of people do this every day by using their GMX or GMail accounts. Or even the Google search. Otherwise you should start searching for weird things on Google so that they won’t be able to figure out what you’re really searching for.

Maybe that’s a bit hard but it’s certainly the bargain. And if you’re uncomfortable with this, it is really easy to avoid: Stop using free services on the net!