What's wrong with four?

Okay, so if you have a look at my usernames on twitter and flickr (linked to the right), you'll see that I tend to stick to one particular four letter username when registering for services. It's my name online, it just is. But for some reason, that's not good enough for some services.

Take Gmail and their requirement for a minimum of 6 characters. Why? What does that possibly accomplish? Okay, so maybe xeyr isn't that big a deal. But what about David? Or Bob? They are forced to never have their name (or accepted abbreviation) as their email username if they choose to use Gmail.

Okay, so I got over the gmail thing a long time ago, but was just reminded about the stupidity of minimum username length requirements when registering for the online component of the SPORE Creature Creator. Again I was told that my regular username was too short, and that I should pick something of 5 or more characters.

Of course, since there are several places with this stupid requirement (and since there are one or two places where I either do not want to be xeyr, or have registered and lost access to the username xeyr for some reason) I do have several other usernames that I occasionally use, but it still irks me. If there was a reason for it, fine, but I can not think of any reason why a four letter username should be treated differently to a 5, 6 or 10 letter username.

Grr!

(posted by Spore user Dibbstar)