Most people tend to register the same username when signing up for services, for obvious reasons. Your username is your personal identity and most people don’t need more than one. It’s also easier to remember. But one thing that is becoming increasingly difficult to remember, with so many new Web services sprouting up ever day, is which services you have signed up for exactly.
A recently launched application called Usernamecheck gives you a great overview at which Web 2.0 services your ‘default’ username has already been registered.
In just a couple of minutes, you’ll know just how hung up you have been on trying out every new service on the block, and which one you’ve once signed up for but have long forgotten about. Or, alternately, where your username has already been taken by somebody else.
Update: the service returned correct results when I tested it, but several commenters are pointing out inaccuracies.
Usernamecheck currently pings 68 services for the username you want to look up, and lets you know instantly if it is still available or not. According to the counter at the bottom of the homepage, over 110,000 user names have already been checked with the service.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some holes to fill.
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lies about yahoo usernames, elvirs is already registered on yahoo.
others are correct i guess.
simple and useful thing, no potential for growth though.
That isn’t the only issue. If you search a three character username and any sites that require a minimum of four characters in the username, UsernameCheck will come back and claim that all the three character usernames are available rather than give an error.
“no potential for growth”
No kidding. Why would anyone come back twice?
I think it’s a useful app
- and am hoping that it will be around for many years to come
How so?
That is something different, Nice to see you can check usernames on multiple networks.
This will be helpful. Thanks for the find.
One wastes so much time seeking a relatively short username without random numbers being added on the end as suggestions
Another great comment from public relations. honestly, do you ever have anything worthwhile to say? It’s people like you that crowd the comment boards with junk. hurts my eyes.
Nice idea …but as #1 already mentioned: doesn’t really provide reliable results, and in my case with a three-lettered username, most sites will ask for a username that has at least 4 characters. So, obviously, there are still some problems to an otherwise great idea.
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Nifty. It should add a domain search. So it would also see if yourusername.com is available
Try this one: http://www.bustaname.com/
try domize.com Super fast, type your name in.
Does bustaname do “front running” on requested domain names and tie up anything that comes back as available?
It also seems to lie about Pandora.
Update: And it lies about WordPress.com. The blog name of “sephr” isn’t taken but I definitely know the username is as it’s my username.
Great service, but not completely accurate. However, thumbs up for the developers!
With the economy situation, we will start seeing companies without business models shutting down. So the big question is….
How are they going to make money?
No need to make money, looks like a side project to me. Web hosting is pretty cheap these days. From the developers site:
“I’ve been building “pet project” sites for the last few years, outside of work. None of which I planned to make money off, none have google ads, they’re there because I hope someone will get some pleasure out of them, or they’ll help them out in some way.”
how will they make money?
Martin answered it above but seriously, why does it always have to be about the money?
Here we have a useful utility that someone released and put no ads on it. They don’t charge, don’t seem to have growth plans. And somehow something is wrong with that to many people.
A lot of you weren’t around for the web bust the first time around. Everyone bleeding every red cent out of every page on the internet makes another bust more and more likely with each passing day.
Thank you to the developer of name check. Nice utility and we appreciate your efforts.
This is why I come to TechCrunch- for the relevant journalism.
I’m still waiting for the “Mike’sDog Likes Bacon” post.
Mike’s Dog Likes Bacon.
OK you can leave now.
@sillicon: How does any web company make money? First get eyeballs, then try to convert to ad revenue.
Lots of ways for companies to make money on the web Thread Pool. People seem to forget about lead gen, ecommerce, licensing and other old industries moved online that are converting dollars outside advertising.
Usernames to sites that I don’t want to visit and don’t matter. Yay!
It’s nice that they don’t pull a VeriSign and register all the user names you search for…
You guys took the time to write about this? Right after your big EVERYONE IS LAYING OFF SO JUMP OFF A BRIDGE NOW series?
Looks like Arrington is desperate as next years TC50+2 will be more like TC50-50.
deadpool is waiting for you.
I like how simple it is. I mentioned it on Twitter a while ago.
I used my email to check for availabilities. It turned out lots of them are taken… which is not true!!
Good work tho. = )
Websites that ask for a username is so web 1.0.
So what do they ask for on Web 2.0 sites?
exactly :):)))
Email address and password as the credentials. Duh.
Goody now when i found out that you only use one password after i crack into your email i just run your name through this site!
A Hacker’s dream.
Next, usernamecheck should offer a premium service that will go register your name for you at all these websites.
useful ,thinks.
but i find flcker, it’s not check right
this service is there for a long time good to see on techcrunch i think this will help this service to get noticed by some good number of internet users
Wrong for gmail , Xbox live , picassa for one id and wrong one for vimeo and myspace for another id. But since all these sites mentioned have an inbuilt mechanism like this which throws you an error if not avaialable , i don’t see the usefulness of the app beyond the first few clicks by curious TC readers.
Usename check will be helpful to know our names are already registered .very useful site.
Makes it easier for someone to know all the accounts they can access if they get someones password, eh? All these wonderful tools are going to make cyber theft easier. Not to mention that the iphone can now double as the stalker phone will all these gps styled apps…
Wow what an awesome Idea! Love it, wonder why noonse thought of this earlier!
JIff
http://www.anonymity.cz.tc
very nice tool wish it can check for emails too yahoo, gmail hotmail etc
It does check for gmail
Pretty neat app. Only concern is squatters. Ever search for a good domain name just to have someone else register it the day you search it?
I hope this service is a: not a squatter and b: does not get used for that purpose.
Otherwise, nifty idea!
Doc
Maybe your success on digg has overwhelmed this tool! For me it seemed it be good only for getting timeout messages! Gave up after waiting to get response for 5 sites in a row that all timed-out.
I like the idea though, and am always peeved to find my favorite online persona has be ‘hijacked’!
Will give it another go when its not as ‘hot’!
(Perhaps they ought at least to offer a csv of results..trade for email?)
Cheers
BS
timed out while checking, oh well!!
Is it down for anyone else? I guess that’s the “tech crunch bump” for you.
Guess the site is down already
The website’s URL isnt working at the moment. Cool idea though, would be interesting to see it work with the OpenID platform.
Oh man, http://isfuckingaweso.me! Now I can rule the internet knowing how awesome I am. I love it…LOL
Excellent utility…Comes in handy and quite interesting to see..
I love it
Can’t see this app going anywhere. Although it is pretty neat.
I can’t see this app at all. It’s gone!
it does not work. many false positives and flase negatives.
What is a flase negative?
This site has closed, but we created a new one in its place: http://checkusernames.com
We check over 100+ sites now, and we corrected the problem which didn’t check for minimum and maximum character requirements in usernames.
Thanks Barry Wise for the update about the new website.
Can you tell me about the script you are using on this site?