Mashable - The Social Media Guide - Latest Comments in UsernameCheck: Mashable Readers Set to Waste 337.5 Man-Hours

Re: UsernameCheck: Mashable Readers Set to Waste 337.5 Man-Hours

Greg — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:41:43 -0000

Sadly, usernamecheck closed last week. I created a usernamecheck clone called http://myuserna.me in order to keep the dream alive. Stop by and give me some feedback. I’m going to add many more sites to check in the coming weeks.

Re: UsernameCheck: Mashable Readers Set to Waste 337.5 Man-Hours

Greg — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 11:44:16 -0000

File this one under testimonial:

http://usernamecheck.isfuck..., period. No, really. I launched my site a few days before usernamecheck hit the tubes. By chance, Jon happened to discover the site and he added it to his list. Since then I've received a steady stream of new users, including Mr. Mashable ;)

I've spent $0 on marketing this site (aside from the logo competition I recently held over at crowdSPRING). Jon has a great service he can leverage with startups looking to attract new users. I'm not sure what the model is but maybe a premium could be had for being moved up the list.

Re: UsernameCheck: Mashable Readers Set to Waste 337.5 Man-Hours

Richard Cunningham — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:07:37 -0000

Jon,

how are you counting hits? each page makes 65 AJAX requests I assume making that 66 for each user of the site.

Also I can't see curl being worse really, unless you assume that people give up on the page before it finishes, since the same number of remote requests are needed but the curl method has a lower memory footprint.

I would suggest a VPS system rather than shared hosting for something like this, probably a $20 slicehost machine would perform better than most shared hosting and few limitations.

Anyway, good luck and well done for getting on mashable.

Re: UsernameCheck: Mashable Readers Set to Waste 337.5 Man-Hours

jeff — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:40:25 -0000

This website blows. Is inaccurate and slow. Can't they do the checks in parallel so we DONT waste so much time watching it crawl through the needlessly long list?

And it gave me a false positive on friend feed.

Broken.

Re: UsernameCheck: Mashable Readers Set to Waste 337.5 Man-Hours

Jon — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 15:43:05 -0000

Hi all, thanks for the comments, glad the site is going over well and is as useful to others as it has been for us.

Couple of specific comments:

@Jeff thanks for the bookmarklet, we've managed to getting round to updating the site so it points at the register page if the username is available and the user if it's already taken, it had been on the to-do list for a while.

@connectionfailur I've taken computerlove out of the list as it was causing consistent issues - some sites just don't work well with the system. Ideally it would be great to be able to ping a URL that just told us if the username was available or taken and nothing else. Tipjoy and a few others have just that (Tipjoy actually built us a URL we could ping). That makes the ping faster and the response more accurate and it stops the sites needing to serve us the entire page.

@Richard Cunningham - rather than a poor implementation, I'd say it was a necessary implementation. Running all those curls in parallel when we were getting 50,000 hits a day would have crushed most hosting providers that were in our price range, and since the site is a pet project and has no budget our price range is cheap and cheerful. This issue has been further exacerbated by Googles decision yesterday to disable our adsense account with little or no explanation. This leaves me with a $100 a month hosting bill for a non profit pet project.... good job my wife understands my hobbies. :-)

Re: UsernameCheck: Mashable Readers Set to Waste 337.5 Man-Hours

Richard Cunningham — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 13:20:35 -0000

The implementation of that site is really poor. Someone needs to tell them about doing parallel fetches with Curl, they could get all them done in about 10 seconds that way.

Re: UsernameCheck: Mashable Readers Set to Waste 337.5 Man-Hours

Melanie — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 22:35:21 -0000

Useful tool, Jeff, thanks! :)

Re: UsernameCheck: Mashable Readers Set to Waste 337.5 Man-Hours

Amber — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 13:08:03 -0000

Thanks for the helpful tip. I must say I feel a small burst of excitement whenever my username is approved! I can truly say that I am a geek to the core. However, with the addition of this web site it makes me wonder how people have such more time in their day to search for these kinds of things? I guess procrastination plays a huge role. Nevertheless, every new social media/networking web site is ultimately going to lead to a life on the internet 24/7.

Re: UsernameCheck: Mashable Readers Set to Waste 337.5 Man-Hours

Jeff — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 10:57:06 -0000

There is a greasemonkey script to do this here: http://jeffpalm.com/usernam...

Re: UsernameCheck: Mashable Readers Set to Waste 337.5 Man-Hours

connectionfailure — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 07:18:20 -0000

Nice work, except it didn't work after it hits the "Computerlove" site. It just hangs there and the little progress dots go on forever.
There ought to be a checkbox next to each site so you can select the ones you want.

Re: UsernameCheck: Mashable Readers Set to Waste 337.5 Man-Hours

Raj — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 00:54:21 -0000

very nice tool. saves a lot of time :) Thanx!

Re: UsernameCheck: Mashable Readers Set to Waste 337.5 Man-Hours

Mauricio Reyes — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 15:46:02 -0000

Definitely adding this site to my bookmarks. Its been my life's mission to secure my username wherever possible since losing out on the .com version back in '97. I still wake up in the middle of the night over that one!

Re: UsernameCheck: Mashable Readers Set to Waste 337.5 Man-Hours

Ezra Butler — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 15:23:09 -0000

i realised that i am not ezrabutler on certain crucial sites. Thx!

Re: UsernameCheck: Mashable Readers Set to Waste 337.5 Man-Hours

Pete — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 15:20:00 -0000

Oh, I shoulda mentioned:

http://mashable.com/2007/09...

Re: UsernameCheck: Mashable Readers Set to Waste 337.5 Man-Hours

Adam Jackson — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 15:06:54 -0000

that's really awesome. Thanks!

Re: UsernameCheck: Mashable Readers Set to Waste 337.5 Man-Hours

okelay — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 14:21:18 -0000

That's why I use sxipper. makes filling forms a lot easier.

Re: UsernameCheck: Mashable Readers Set to Waste 337.5 Man-Hours

Harbinger Entity — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 11:54:02 -0000

My mildly obsessive quest for internet dominance begins afresh.

Re: UsernameCheck: Mashable Readers Set to Waste 337.5 Man-Hours

Jeff — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 11:45:13 -0000

You can convert all the available links to 'sign up' links that link to the registration pages here: http://jeffpalm.com/usernam...

Re: UsernameCheck: Mashable Readers Set to Waste 337.5 Man-Hours

Justin Leon — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 11:20:13 -0000

My old screen was registered on half of those sites (many of them I really didn't even use!)