Remember when the web was young and we were all really trusting of usernames and IDs? I remember being on a woodworkers email list or news group and someone had the name/ID “Norm Abrams”. People were all excited to think they were getting email from Norm of New Yankee Workshop. Yeah, well it wasn’t him.
Things haven’t really changed have they? When someone has the ID “trishussey” you expect it to be me, right? The thing is that it isn’t always, especially where celebrities and brands are involved.
Gillian Shaw of the Vancouver Sun wrote a pretty telling piece this week about big companies–like major banks–not even aware of people using their name on Twitter.
Stiennon said already there has been a rush to claim all one- and two-letter Twitter IDs, similar to the early rush on dot-com names. A search of other Canadian banks on Twitter shows that @BMO leads to Twitter user Brian Moffatt.
At PricewaterhouseCoopers, global CIO Michael Calyniuk, said he is looking into a Twitter site with the ID PWC, which he isn’t aware of the company having.
“We are doing this from a security standpoint,” he said. “PWC is trademarked.”
The appearance of @scotiabank on Twitter has that bank trying to get the name — which appears complete with the bank’s logo — off the Twitter site.
“I personally wasn’t aware of it,” said Frank Switzer, director of public affairs at Scotiabank. “We’ll investigate and take the appropriate action.”
[From Web world’s all a-Twitter about seizing big corporate names]
Twitter is just one place you have to reserve your name. StumbleUpon, Digg, Del.icio.us … the list goes on. Have you made sure that your name isn’t taken by someone else?
I go and sign up for as many social media services almost right away not always to try them, but just to reserve my name space.
Are you check? Is your company check?
Yeah you might want to.
Like now.
Tris Hussey is a writer, teacher, blogger, and speaker on all facets of Internet life, WordPress, and social media. If you are interested in having Tris speak, teach, lead a workshop or consult for you, feel free to email tris [at] trishussey [dot] com.
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There's another Deborah Ng blogging somewhere. I'm hoping she's not a Deb Ng, it's confusing enough as it is.
I used UserNameCheck to grab all of mine a while back
I just checked and I think most of the ones up are me … I hope http://usernamecheck.com/
Tris, I'm an Obama supporter and I remember being really really angry that his campaign staff didn't reserve his MySpace page in 2007 and that they pushed one of his biggest supporters out of the space. Here's that article: http://www.meme.ca/Obama-20-MySpace-is-My-Space-0...
Everybody talks about how he won the election via the internet, but I think we forget about this lack of planning – especially since the Dean campaign had been celebrated for its ingenuity. I am so glad to see Lawrence Lessig so involved in the Obama campaign today. Anyone looking to go into politics in the next few years needs to hire someone like you.
HIRE TRIS HUSSEY! And avoid a domain war.
Thanks Dana! We even had the same problem in Vancouver with our mayoral election. The candidate who eventually won had scooped his opponent's name on Twitter.
Unfortunately they also started to use the Twitter id as satire. Not cool.
You are very correct. As founder of Internet email in Pakistan and the world's first Imran online
I had no problem getting imran as a user name everywhere. Now there are more than a few Imran Anwar guys out there so even imrananwar can be tricky.
My newest project is nEternity (EternalSite) which is the only web content perpetuity service of its kind, which is why getting your name there is a good idea too.
Imran
"Live, Forever" http://neternity.org
Meh I'm disappointed to see that 12seconds has a TrishaLyn already and I know it's not me lol