After domain squatting, here comes online identity squatting

Someone took loiclemeur at Plurk and started sending "porn crap" under my name. Problem is that through recommended friends etc I had 112 of my real friends who had friended that fake loiclemeur. Here is what it looks like:

There is an interesting conversation over at friendfeed about that. It took a moment after the plurk team saw my tweet about the porn stuff under my name, they got rid of the plurks and are getting the loiclemeur name back to me. Several people asked if I should have my name back so easily and if there are no loic le meurs around. There are many Loic Le Meurs in France, fortunately for me they do not seem to be too much in Social Software. If a valid loiclemeur had taken it I would have been fine with not getting it back.

What really sucks though is that now, each time you have a new socialsoftware around (or new features like rooms in an existing one) you need to go as fast as possible and get your name so that your friends can recognize you easily. We really need openid to be more widely adopted (does openid solve this? unsure about that).

It is a pity to get its name stolen but even worse to see the above behavior which is really aiming at your online reputation. If Plurk had not done anything it would have ended up in Google etc. Here comes online identity squatting, be fast when new social software get traction.

update: Seth Eagelfeld compares this story to Shel Israel being stolen his shelisrael.com by Loren Feldman. I do not think this is the same case as everybody knew it was Loren (not anonymous) and it was not using a social software but a domain name, Shel should have probably secured this one and could go complain directly to the author while I do not even know who to complain to...