Everyone is pressed for time these days. Especially online. You have 347 friends waiting (not really) for you to blog or ‘invite’ them to the 567th fan profile you subscribed to in Friendster, 145 people in your email address book waiting to be invited to join Multiply and ‘view’ your album, and 20 people in your blogroll (+87 in your link-exchange page) waiting to comment on your latest blog entry. So why not save time when checking one of your (7+) forum-subscriptions and check replies to YOUR threads only?

This is not a you-are-going-to-the-seven-hells post about being narcissistic. With self-publishing almost free (thanks to the web), who wouldn’t do these things? I was just wondering if anyone else noticed (and have reacted to) the fact that a forum platform such as phpBB have actually incorporated this narcissistic side of us web people into the actual phpBB code… Don’t know what I’m talking about? Login to one of your (7+) forums that uses phpBB3 and look for the view your posts option/link.

Look at your browser’s address bar (I find that by this time, the most narcissistic readers will correct me and mutter *my APPLE’S SAFARI address bar*) and you will see something like this:

http://sitename.com/search.php?search_id=egosearch

ego search

which a quick Google will tell you is the practice or act of searching for oneself or one’s nickname or web pseudonym.

Well, ego-istic purpose or not, I find that I have been guilty of ego-searching ever since I’ve finished reading some crackpot conspiracy-theory online. It is a characteristic of the web that it can only hold so much interesting info before you discover self-pleasure. Which is what you get from finding how much of an imprint you have left (so far) in the world-wide web.

If you haven’t tried it yet, you can do it. There’s no need to login to one of your phpBB3-powered forums. Just Google your own name (most likely will turn up legal records such as school stuff, employment, criminal offences… oops). Or if you’re more of a regular web-person, try your favorite username. You’d be surprised how much info the FBI can collect on you should they ever condescend to track you down (not that I’m inspiring you to do anything to force them too).

It’s not entirely narcissistic. I ego-searched my own uncle and found a ton of links all referring to his fullname (with the doctor, engineer, etc. titles) which I promptly related to my grandmother. Just so she knows how important her son is in the world. (It’s hard to assess his ‘worldly’ importance when she can only gauge him by how well he raised his children.) And that was just the LEGAL stuff! Who knows what will come up when I get hold of one of his pseudonyms. I might discover that my uncle is actually contributing to phpBB3, or making iPhone apps as a hobby, or selling cocaine on the side (but that’s just me wanting an exciting life).

To cut this post short, I think it’s funny that the geeks at phpBB actually called this board feature of theirs ego-search. Which means that either they have a good sense of humor (kudos to them) or they’re so geeky that they do not find anything offending about the term^* (it’s just the geeky way of calling things).

^* I was offended. How dare they expose me like that?! Have I exposed you too?

EDIT: I have attached a low-res screencap of the ego search by phpBB3. For matt’s enlightenment. XD And yours too, if you like.

a screencap of me ego-searching myself in a phpbb3 powered forum