UserNameCheck: A very cool way to see what sites your username is available on

[mouser]

From a blog entry on cnet/webware:

If you're one of those people who tries to grab his or her own preferred username on every new service that comes along, just in case the service becomes hot one day and you want to start using that cool ID, check out this new tool: Usernamecheck.

All it does is ask you for a user name, and then pings about 45 services so it can return to you "taken" or "available" for each one.

If a name is taken, it can't tell you if the owner of it is you or someone else (how would it know?), and there's as yet no way to add new sites for it to check--you have to wait for the developer to add them. Also, it's slow. And it doesn't appear to work on anything but Firefox.

But this is a useful tool for managing one's personal brand. And here's a tip for parents-to-be: Run your baby names through it, as well as through BustAName. Your kid might thank you.

http://usernamecheck.com/

from http://news.cnet.com..._109-10049298-2.html

[Deozaan]

How did my name get on Xbox?

[Deozaan]

Okay I found out how I got on Xbox, but the thing also says I'm on Reddit, but when I go to Reddit's website and try to recover my password it says that user doesn't exist.

So I think usernamecheck is broken for Reddit.

[lanux128]

i have the same problem with reddit and xbox.

[Deozaan]

I just tried the username "neozilla4682pgtaftts" to test it out and it said it was taken on 4 of the sites (livejournal, reddit, visualizeus, and Xbox). However, when clicking the links, each website said the profile/user didn't exist.

That's a lot of false positives.

[housetier]

This is extremely important for me, thanks for finding it!

[Edvard]

Uh-oh...

About UserNameCheck.com
We have suffered some outages over the last few hours, partly from the volume, but in all honesty I screwed up part of the code and it was causing huge server loads. Dreamhost have been awesome and are working with me to fix the issues I have created. Until they are fixed you can't currently do any username checks, I'll update the status on our twitter account as it happens...

[Paul Keith]

Beat me to it Edvard. That's too bad, I was looking to test the site out.

[tinjaw]

It should be rewritten in Python and moved to Google Apps Engine. 

[app103]

It's back up again.

A few of the sites will return a "taken" on every name you give, and a few time out with no results at all.

Thanks for finding this...it will help with a small info collection project I am working on. That site provided more info for things I didn't know I was missing.