Gotta make sure no one tries to impersonate me on fanfiction.net...

November 25, 2010 8:59 AM

AskMe is always saying that one should register their full name on certain web services, just to protect them for future use. I have the basics - what am I missing?

I'm a graduate student in music (not performance) who does gig (bassoon) on the side. I'm also starting to get in the publishing realm, in regards to my academic writings. I'd also like to start getting into blogging in my field, though that may be when I have more of the so-called "free" time.

I have a Facebook account (only a personal one, not a professional one), a gmail account that's [e-mail], and a twitter account with my full name. I also have my full name as a domain, but nothing on the site yet - just a placeholder.

What am I missing? What other sites should I get an account at just to make sure it's there for future use?

posted by SNWidget to computers & internet (8 answers total)

Tumblr is the fastest growing free blog service. Many people have personal sites.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 9:12 AM on November 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

LinkedIn public profile URL?
posted by EndsOfInvention at 9:26 AM on November 25, 2010

Are you thinking "Let me register things that I might possibly want to use someday" or "Let me register things to make sure I don't get confused with other people of the same name"?

For example it's not likely you would want to actually use *both* Wordpress.com and Blogger as they're too similar. Ditto for Tumblr and Posterous, or Gmail and Hotmail. But if you want to just grab the name so no one else can, you might want to register on all of them.

You might want to skim the top sites on this list for ideas:

http://www.google.com/adplanner/static/top1000/

Depending on your interests, you might want to grab ids on LinkedIn, Skype, Scribd etc.
posted by philipy at 9:43 AM on November 25, 2010

philipy - Probably both of those statements.

I was thinking about getting hotmail, yahoo, etc etc, and just having them all redirect to my gmail.

Thanks for the list - that'll be a big help.

Mainly, I'm just trying to consolidate a professional online identify, and lay the groundwork for any future presence I may want to have (and make sure no one else can use my name). Luckily, I've got a moderately uncommon first/last combo, so most places still have it open - I just have to figure out which ones to do.
posted by SNWidget at 9:49 AM on November 25, 2010

As far as having a professional identity goes, having your own domain probably trumps everything else. You can blog there, have email addresses there, show off your work there - even if it's actually physically hosted somewhere else - and so on.

If you put up any significant content on your own domain, it'll almost certainly be what people that Google you will find first, and will form the basis of how they view you.

Btw one nice thing about Tumblr is that not only can you have a free blog there, if you have your own domain, you can have the blog appear on your domain rather than Tumblr's site, and also all for free.

http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/custom_domains

That does require a little bit of tech confidence, but I guess you can always pick the MeFi brain if you need help.
posted by philipy at 10:42 AM on November 25, 2010

I know you have a Facebook account but do you have a vanity URL for it? I suspect the vanity URLs is what Facebook will use as email addresses.
posted by serunding at 11:54 AM on November 25, 2010

don't forget openid. also i'd consider signing up for all the other services that janrain support (i.e. twitter, myspace).

but really, philipy is right. the best solution is to sign up for a domain name that you use as a central repo for all your other identities. in lieu of this, you could submit a PGP key to a well known public-key server and start signing important, public pieces of work, so that if an impersonator comes along you can say "i sign all important public statements; who exactly did you say you were again?"
posted by asymptotic at 5:35 AM on November 26, 2010

Namechk.com provides the motherlode in terms of Web 2.0 sites where you might want to register your user name or start a profile.
posted by Jaybo at 1:24 PM on January 25, 2011