Every once in a while I get brainstorms about projects I’d like to start online; these mainly blogs and or forums as those are my forte. Well it’s not really once in a while, I’m always getting ideas but often discount them, only a few I actually move on. Moving on an idea to me means buying domains and reserving gmail, yahoo, msn, aol, twitter, and myspace IDs after wards I start researching the topic a bit, look at who’s sitting on top of search results, etc.
One of my biggest problems is centralizing communications. For instance I now have about 7 Yahoo, AOL, MSN, and Google IDs. Now, I rarely IM as I find it a big distraction however I for some reason feel obligated to login to these IDs as I list them on the websites as just maybe someone wants to talk to me. ;) One of the reasons for reserving all those service IDs is brandabilty. I don’t want someone else to snag the name and hold it hostage as has been documented with some Twitter and IM accounts.
Email is a large problem although I’ve pretty much nipped it in the bud. I just forward everything into Gmail then use their reply as feature although it still shows my Google ID which is an annoyance but I can live with that. It seems every service has it’s own email address included as a ‘feature’; Yahoo, AOL, and MSN all include a free email address with the account which I normally ignore but some people whom I do talk to on IM right click and email me via the IM client, which means the mail goes to that address.
Another issue particularly with large services like MySpace and Yahoo is that everything seems to be already taken, it’s rare that I find the name I want is available, normally I have to modify it some how. When my name is available I get all giddy.
Today I hit it two fold! I brainstormed for a new project and registered the domain yesterday. The domain is BigGuyLittleWorld.com it will officially be launched later on this month, the idea behind the blog is documenting my weight loss trials and tribulations. I figure it will help me to be held accountable by posting for the world to see and perhaps my thoughts will help someone else trying to find their way. Of course I plan on adding some quips about how Movie Theaters, airlines, etc just plain aren’t made for big people.
To make a long story short, I registered the domain and went to reserve the screen names all of them were available. The only problem was AOL and Twitter required me to shorten it a bit to get a name so I got annoyed and bought another domain..BigGuyLilWorld.com which is where I’ll actually publish the site. I went a second round and got all the ID’s for MSN, Yahoo, AOL, Twitter, MySpace, etc. Now I got another set of IDs to remember, I probably won’t use the full names bigguylittleworld.com and just use the shorter versions.
Another aspect of the problem for me at least is my identity. I like to keep things separate so choosing one and sticking with it is a problem sometimes as I like keep my DJ contacts separate from say my friends and family.
How do you deal with branding and communcations across several different domains and brands?
#1 by Sacramento Weddings on August 15, 2008 - 11:01 am
I’ve been told “the fewer characters in a domain, the better” (mine has 5 including a hyphen).
Good luck with your consolidation plans!
#2 by Dan on August 15, 2008 - 11:09 am
Thanks Matt
The fewer letters in the domain the better is true but also keyword heavy domains help too. 
#3 by site on October 22, 2010 - 4:45 pm
I feel I should say, I love your site. Could let me know how I can go about keeping up to date with it? By the way I discovered this site through Lycos.