josh bernoff’s wrote some rather juvenile commentary a couple days ago on why he is sick of the term “users” and i think its only appropriate that i take a stand for all you users out there. he argues that since everyone is a user we should stop calling them users and ‘backs up’ the argument with the following ironclad logic:

Nobody talks about users of dishwashers, or users of retail stores, or users of telephones. So why are we talking about “users” of computers, browsers, and software?

it only makes sense that i use bernoffian logic to make my counterargument. how about this: since we call people who drive cars, drivers and people who prepare food, cooks, and people who write software, programmers, we should call people who use a particular service or application, users of that service or application.

for some communities there are specific terms, such as digger (for digg), twit (for twitter), but for many others the generic term “user” is used as a synonym for “community member”. you can be a facebooker, a member of the facebook community, or a facebook user. they’re all the same except for the fact that,

1. facebooker - makes you sound like a moron.
2. facebook community member - is unnecessarily cumbersome.
3. facebook user - is familiar and immediately understandable

i’m a user, you’re a user, duncan is definitely a user, and so are millions of others. don’t try to take that away from us.