Recently Closed Usernamecheck Offers How-To Guide
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
Even after being shut down last week, Usernamecheck.com is doing something interesting and not often seen in the volitale ocean of start-ups and side projects on the web: showing anyone how to re-create it.
This pet project-turned-social media hot button voluntarily shut down on February 19th. It was the one-stop shop for finding out if your preferred username was taken or not among 65 different networks and services. Boasting over one million unique visitors at the time of its shuttering, upkeep and hosting became an unavoidable problem. In fact, it was only 10 days after the site checked its 500,000th name that the plug was pulled.
Earlier today, their Twitter page announced that the site put up a how-to guide, encouraging someone to pick up where usernamecheck.com left off. The site is offering to link to any clones that are submitted as well. The web should have more of this: lowering the barrier to entry so anyone can create something that is actually useful and valuable to the largest amount of people. It’s often a big driver behind today’s most popular social applications and is also a pretty good rule of thumb when it comes to creating on the web for your brand – “what’s in it for me?”
Hopefully we’ll see some interesting re-creatings or derivatives of this soon. What improvements would you make to the Usernamecheck if you built a clone?
