The other day when I posted about Zonbu, I added a few sentences expressing that I’d rather call people who own and use a device as “owners” instead of “users”, if appropriate:
…ownership implies that the possession serves its owner’s needs, whereas the word “user” suggests one who has adapted their own habits to suit their possessions. May we all be owners of our possessions and not merely users.
It seems I’m in good company of others tiring of the word “user”, first of all Josh Bernoff who suggested the pledge: “I promise to avoid the word user whenever possible. I will think of people who use technology as people, customers, and friends. I won’t use them, and they won’t use me.” I agree with this wholeheartedly, and the ensuing discussion in the comments of alternate terms to use besides “people” is interesting. He linked to this well thought out article by Thomas Van Der Wal, who has been thinking about this problem for some time, and also Robert Scoble who thought fixation on “users” was “screwing the long tail” way back in June of 2006. I wonder if he has updated his thoughts on that since then.
I’m left with a conundrum, however: if I can’t call people who use Skweezer (which is our public mobile web browsing service that’s meant to be, well, used) “users”, what do we call them? Jimmy Guterman has the same problem and so do his commenters, it appears.
- “People” - not descriptive. I’m afraid we’ll just revert to “people who use Skweezer” and then shorten it to “users”
- “Customers” - Skweezer is free, so our “customers” are Advertisers, and we already call them that
- “Owners” - same sort of problem as above, but it makes up in positive connotations what it lacks in accuracy
- “Members” - works for people who have accounts, but is not all-inclusive
- “Browsers” - better for Skweezer, but we already use this to talk about the web browsing software on phones
- “Community” - no singular term that I know of except “member”
- “Client” - maybe…
- “User” - maybe it’s best after all?
Update: This topic is officially crunched and meme’d now. Hooray.
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