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Not long ago, an entirely amusing site called Useless Account popped up. At Useless Account , users go through the all-too-familiar steps of filling in a form to get a free account. And once you're signed up, what does your Useless Account account do for you? Well, you can log out, log back in again, and edit your account information. In fact, the service offers "unlimited account editing." Apart from that: nothing. It's a Useless Account.

It was one of the better pieces of pointed satire to hit the Net lately, and mostly because it jabs at an increasingly sore point: How many "free" online services must we go through the motions of signing up for? You know the drill: You've already got the Gmail account, the Flickr account, the Facebook account, the MSN account, the YouTube account, the Hotmail account, the Expedia account, the Wikipedia account, and on and on.

And those are just the big sites that actually do something. Never mind the raft of new "Web 2.0" websites that flock online every week, each one demanding a username and e-mail address before you can even find out whether it's a useful account, or that other kind.

It's a problem that's older than the Web itself. One of the Internet's basic weaknesses is that there's no central way of keeping track of who you are.

In real life, we have one identity that we take everywhere (it's the one on your passport, assuming you can get one these days). But there's no virtual passport in cyberspace: People change names online more often than they change underpants. Every time you go to a new website, you have to start the process of identifying yourself all over again.

This matters, because every time you sign up for a new website, you're not just creating an account, you're starting a new identity. Most websites these days ask their readers to contribute to them — to upload videos on YouTube, to edit pieces on Wikipedia, to post career-cancelling photos of themselves on social-networking sites like Facebook.

And using these tools, we build personas that are every bit as invented as the kind you find in virtual-reality games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft, where people dress up like elves and prance about, making elf friends and living elf lives. If you look at your account on YouTube, your identity is defined by the videos you've uploaded. On Wikipedia, you are what you edit. On Facebook, the object seems to be to post 50 photos of yourself in varying states of boozy undress. But every time you do it, you reinvent yourself a little.

And bully for you: The ability to recreate yourself endlessly has always been one of the Internet's great joys. But what if you actually want to identify yourself as the same person from one website to the next? Then you're in trouble, because none of these websites talks to one another. For instance, there's no easy way of seeing the Wikipedia entries made by a person who uploaded a given YouTube video, or vice versa. Even if you pick the same username across different sites, and leave pedantic little messages on each one explaining who you are, it's hard for a reader to verify if that's true.

The upshot is that nobody can see your online contributions as a whole. Like it or not, they can only see these fragmentary shards of you: The woman who puts all the cat videos on YouTube is divorced from the woman who compulsively edits articles about cargo cranes on Wikipedia — even when they're the same person. In this muddle, the idea of "you" as someone with a single identity gets lost.

This is especially ironic given all the recent hoopla about "You" — the "You" part of "YouTube," the "You" that won Time Magazine's Person of the Year award (and I hope you got that thing framed). Since, ostensibly, it's "you" who has been providing all this content that has been lining other people's wallets, media companies have a vested interest in hyping the idea of defining yourself. But in reality, they're just worsening a bad case of "you" proliferation.

This is why there's been a growing online grumble about "social network fatigue." It's more than a frustration with signing up for umpteen useless accounts; it's the exhaustion that comes from being asked to build an online identity over and over again. Yes, young people have an inexhaustible desire to try on and discard alternative personas like clothing. But the point comes where you say, can't I just be me?

There are no easy solutions at the moment.

The Internet brain trust has long been cooking up ways of toting your ID with you from website to website take a look at OpenID.com for one potential solution) — though, so far, no major players have jumped on board. But as the Net-savvy population ages, the novelty of being someone new on every website will wear off, and demand for a universal login will become more pronounced. The Internet will always offer a chance to reinvent yourself on the side. But sooner or later, people are going to start balking at signing up for yet another useless account.

webseven@globeandmail.com