My Design Should Follow Me; “First Dibs” on my username

By Steve Poland   •   July 9, 2008

On Twitter, you can customize how your profile design appears to other users. It personalizes my page on Twitter to others.

All services I’m on should allow this — well, at least the ones that are similar [microblogging; blogging; myspace; etc].

I think it’d be great if there was a centralized storage of my simple design attributes [colors; bg image; etc] that web services could tap into, to immediately personalize their service to me.

It’d be great if I also could get “first dibs” on the usernames I like to use on web services. [This could be a service that I pay $5/yr for, or whatever, and they'll email me each day/week when they secure a login for me --for my preferred username-- at some new web service. Maybe MyBlogLog or FriendFeed would do this for me, because they'd likely know whether or not I have an account already with the "new" web service].




Related posts:

  1. Idea #82 - FriendFeed the new Twitter? WTF. OK, so I finally signed up for FriendFeed — and yes, it’s cool. I just feel like it’s been around. I mean, it has via different services already (MyBlogLog had this awhile back, but just...
  2. Twitter Username Management Script (TUMS) The script is no longer for sale. Purchase of the script entitles you to one license for commercial or personal use, but not resale. Upon your purchase, the script is available via secure download link...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Comments

2 Responses to “My Design Should Follow Me; “First Dibs” on my username”

  1. MyAvatars 0.2 Zvi Band on July 10th, 2008 12:44 am (perm link)

    I think the “first dibs” idea would be really cool… hard to automate though, given each service would have its own unique system. But it could be a good use of low-cost labor, to pay to have someone overseas register you for a service the second it pops up on TechCrunch or Mashable…

    of course if everyone went with an openid or Facebook login, some kind of centralized authentication, you would never have to worry about this again :-)

  2. MyAvatars 0.2 Chris on September 9th, 2008 1:31 am (perm link)

    Good points about the automation difficulty and OpenID. However, consider this additional caveat. Even if such a service were automated, would it still be feasible? Essentially, you’re creating accounts for N-subscribers on M-services. Assuming both N and M will grow, you’re looking at exponential growth. Even if you have the resources to handle this, I doubt some would-be startup will appreciate you auto-creating a million unused accounts in the hope that someone “may” want to use their service.

Got something to say?





*
To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the security word shown in the picture. Click on the picture to hear an audio file of the word.
Click to hear an audio file of the anti-spam word