On April 1st a good friend of mine, Andy Edinborough, and I launched a new website, namechk.com. Namchk helps visitors check the top social network sites for their desired username availability. Visiting the top 100 social sites one at a time would take a lot of time, but Namechk queries all of them in about 12 seconds.
So far the traffic to the site has far surpassed what Andy and I had expected. We did this as a fun project because we thought the service was needed and no other site was providing a quality service similar to this. We have been pleasantly surprised with how well the site has been received by the media and especially by users. You guys rock!
It is amazing to see how things evolve that you never even think about before launching a project. For example, namechk has received hundreds of tweets about the site on Twitter in different languages from people all over the world. Namechk is not “language specific.” You can enter a username in French and it will tell you if it is available. International traffic and props from international users was definitely a cool surprise.
Andy is the best .NET developer I have ever worked with. Developing Namechk only took Andy a couple days in his spare time. We have a lot of useful ideas for the site and plan to add additional features in the near future.
Now that the site has been so well received there have been a large number of requests by users for additional features such as auto-registration on all the sites we query. We are looking into this to see how it could be achieved in the best user experience possible.
Andy and I realize the need for efficiency in securing your username or vanity URL across the web and we hope Namechk helps in that regard. We would love to hear your feedback so please connect with namechk on Twitter and let us know what you think.
More news will follow in the weeks to come. Thanks everyone!
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