Digital real estate sounds like something that would pop up in an episode of Futurama but the fact is we’re all vying for it in some way or another.
The biggest way we do this is through the use of usernames particularly for email accounts.
Anybody that has ever tried to get NameSurname@Email.com using a publicly available email service such as Gmail will know that more often than not your username is gone.
So one Redditor has had the brilliant idea of giving the young kids in his life a slice of digital real estate before they even know they need it.
User ThePeoplesBard took to the r/technology subreddit to explain that whenever somebody in his life has a baby he creates an email account for them.
“It’s annoyed me for a long time that I couldn’t get [ThePeoplesBard]@gmail.com, so whenever a new person is born in my life, I try to secure the precious real estate for them–so they can use it when they grow up,” the user wrote in a letter that will be stored in the child’s email account.
Even though he was planning ahead ThePeoplesBard had to chose a variation of the child’s name because that name had already been taken by another user.
“At least this way you won’t have to settle for Sk8terGirl[Baby] or whatever is still available in ten years. I mean, unless you’re a Sk8terGirl, of course. That’d be just fine. But you’ll probably want a vanilla address like this for your resume,” wrote ThePeoplesBard.
The user won’t be giving the child this email address directly (likely because children have no need to send or receive emails just yet) but will rather hand the account over to her parents who can pass the credentials along in the future.
We highly recommend heading over to Reddit to read the letter if you’re in need of a smile this morning.
When someone in my life has a baby, I try to secure the digital “real estate” of an email address as a gift for the kid; herein is the content of the first email in an account I’m giving to a one-year-old (or her parents) this weekend from r/technology
While we read the post a thought did occur to us – when will we run out of usernames.
As ThePeoplesBard points out getting your name as a username is not always a given and with 1 billion people using Gmail in 2016 according to Statista the problem seems like it will only get worse as more people join the internet.
Naturally “worse” is a matter of opinion here because while I would have loved to have brendyn@gmail.com as my email address the username that I eventually chose was more suited to both my lifestyle and the work I was looking for at the time.
YouTube channel Vsauce took a look at the subject of names and while usernames are not the entire the focus of the video there are some interesting points and figures for you to ponder on.
So perhaps in the future we’ll see more folks gifting babies with email addresses, Facebook accounts and other digital real estate in a bid to secure usernames.
That, or businesses just need to understand that xXx_Sn1per_3l33t_xXx@gmail.com likely had no other usernames available to them.
