photo credit: Caveman 92223
Just off the latest PodCamp Ireland podcast on Blogtalk Radio where, when looking over activities of the past week, we got around to talking about protecting your username, personal name or business name online when it comes to web services.
This stems from a blog post Pat Phelan published recently about brands and their use of Twitter and the check comes, possibly, from a tweet by Tom Raftery.
UsernameCheck.com is a service which allows you to see if your preferred username for your person, business or brand is available on a multitude of webservices. You don’t need to enter a password, just your chosen username and the site will check whether or not the name is available on everywhere from 12seconds.tv to Digg, eBay, Flickr, Last.fm, Typepad, Twitter, Youtube and a whole host more.
Given that “93 of top 100 brands don’t control their Twitter name†(taken from Pat’s post) if you’re worried about control of your brand name on the web, whether Twitter or elsewhere, I’d get checking via UsernameCheck.com sooner rather than later.
Nice tool. There’s also a tool that does the same thing at http://namechk.com/
I wrote a tool that monitors your desired twitter name and emails you when the name is free (they eventually delete inactive accounts): http://www.tweettaker.com/