The last BarCamp I attended (BarCampLondon3) at Google’s London HQ, I was chatting to one of the girlies from Google about the concept of “land grabbing” occurring in the social networking (socweb) space. Well actually, she brought it up, and it all started by me requesting an invite to Jaiku. “Sure, whats your email address?”, so I handed over my gmail address, which I prefer for socweb type stuff, may as well keep it all Web 2.0 - plus I don’t like having that stuff come through on my hosted exchange email (it gets BACN‘d anyway). She was absolutely gob smacked that my email addy was hamlesh@gmail.com, so essentially my firstname@, keep in mind she works for Google. Which led us onto why I was wanting the Jaiku invite, not to actively use the system, sure I poked around for a little while to see what its all about, my main reason for joining though was simply to secure my name.
David Hinson recently introduced me to friendfeed.com, its a socweb aggregation platform, and its built very cleanly and has support for a large number of what we would call web 2.0 socwebs. I signed up (to actually use it), and created my various associations with different platforms.
The result made me actually laugh out loud!
On every single major platform, my nick is “hamlesh”. Its frigging annoying that Spock decides to add some random characters after you nick/name (stupid thing, I’m god damn unique damn it!).
If you are using freindfeed, please add me, unsuprisingly, yes, my nick is “hamlesh” on there too 
Friendfeed is an important step to the emergence of a unified socweb platform, much like the work Google are doing with opensocial, the space is looking very exciting at present - damn it, I should live in SV!
So, as these platforms grow do you think we’ll start seeing the emergence of socweb “camper”/”squatter” type operations? Much like with domain names, where the desired (and in a lot of cases random!) socweb nicknames will be grabbed, held on to, and then sold on to whomever wants them… people do all sorts of crazy things for a few bucks.
Hopefully I haven’t just given birth to a pain in the ass idea! I guess the major deterent will be the actually AUP of these platforms, then again, this will cause more work as they’ll have to enforce these things.
Anyway, thats all for now, queue the “you utter barstard” comments from some of my geekier mates
May 28th, 2008 at 10:10
[...] a Twitter account, if only to make sure I got my username before someone else does, known as “land grabbing” - some say this Twitter lark is the new Facebook but I’m not so sure. Maybe I’ll use [...]