Well, like I said yesterday…we have finally decided on a name.
That’s a big thing, I know.
But now, it’s time to move on to the important things.
Of course you know what I’m talking about…right?
Naturally, I’m talking about a domain name, email address (Gmail, of course), Twitter username and Facebook username. You know. The important stuff.
Now…of course I have no idea if these will still be sites that are used like we use them today when Caleb is old enough to know what he’s doing…but I guess part of me wants to have them just in case.
Looking around, I did find some fairly ridiculous reasons for getting domain names. Hatch Domains tries to sell you on the idea that your child can use it for a future business – or running for politics!
Having a domain name for your child is very important because it is an asset. Registering your son or daughters place on the Internet is like buying a piece of land in an up-and-coming neighborhood before the value increases. Wouldn’t you want your kid to have a great place? Buying your kids name as a domain name is buying into their Internet future. There are two domain extensions that would be great for your child. In the future your child will be able to use it to share photos, put their resume, or even open their online business. If they get into politics it could even help them win an election. You want to secure your kid’s name before somebody else does.
Here’s another article on a parenting website that talks about reserving domains and getting your baby’s name on social media sites, recognizing the importance of social media in our world today.
So that’s my goal for today – to pick the domain name and then get an email address and perhaps a Twitter username. Unfortunately, someone already has @calebelijah and @calebwc on Twitter, so…not sure what to do there. But I think I can at least get calebwc.com and shoot for a good Gmail email address.
One thing I heard that a parent did was send emails, photos, and videos to his son’s email address as a way of creating a digital baby book (in a way), so when his son was able to start using his email address, he had all of this fun stuff and photos to go through. I thought that was a pretty cool idea, and I think I’ll probably play around with that.
What are your thoughts about all this? Entirely unnecessary? Ridiculous? A cool way to secure these things for our kids in case they’re still using email and websites and Twitter?
Eli Ruggles says
We own the domain name that is a nickname/mutation of our family name – roogles.com (It’s been one of my nicknames since high school).
The day that each of our kids was born I gave them an email address on the @roogles.com domain. For now we have those forwarded to Jenn (mom) and I, but when they are old enough to use them we will hand them over.
Twitter wasn’t that big when our first two were born, but we secured @lillyroogles for our youngest one on her birth day as well, and we tweeted from it when she was less than 1 year old, but now we’re just saving it for her.
Chad Herring says
My bet is that whatever you do now will not be quite what he wants to use then, so don’t worry about it. Let him do it as he gets older… Besides, even 5 years is an eternity. Who knows what the standard system will be when he gets old enough to start using these things for himself.
Shawn Coons says
Two disclaimers:
1) I have shawncoons as my domain name and my use name all over the place.
2) Shortly after my son was born I did reserve the domain name that was his name.
That being said, I don’t think I would reserve it now if I hadn’t already, and I may not renew the domains. And I’ve never considered getting facebook, twitter or other user names for him. When our daughter came into our family it didn’t even occur to me, and she has a pretty distinct name so it may not be necessary.
The main reason I’m not worried about it is that I know that the sites we use and especially how we navigate the internet will be different when my kids are old enough for all this to matter.
When I first got on the internet in 1990 I used IP addresses and port numbers: 128.255.200.26 4242 or an address like: sunrise.isca.uiowa.edu. Then the Web came along and we used wonderful addresses like: http://www.erols.com/users/~shawncoons/pages/euchre/index.html. Eventually we got to more custom domain names that you still had to type in completely correctly: http://www.shawncoons.com. And now we have autocomplete, bookmarks that sync across multiple devices, and half the time I just google the website I want instead of typing in the full domain name. And as the internet increases the viritual real estate is going to have to increase (much like the shift from IPv4 to IPv6). I read an article yesterday about paying $185,000 for a brand domain extension (like .pepsi or .coke instead of .com).
User names are changing too. With many more sites using Twitter or FB logins to sync with their own. At some point the idea of a user name will seem archaic much like dial telephones and Lindsey Lohan.
I guess there’s no harm in getting user names that are free, but I think paying for a domain name is a waste of money that would be better spent in a college fund.
Just my $.02
steve says
Adam, you are utterly ridiculous for even thinking of this. but it doesn’t surprise me at all. 🙂 Love ya bro.