Search for an Online Identity

Michael Garrity — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 23:20:00 GMT

A major part of online marketing is establishing a strong brand identity, which means that consumers have to be able to easily find your online properties (websites, social media profiles, mobile sites, etc.) for you to see real success on the Web.

The absolute best way to do this is to ensure that your primary website's domain name and social network URLs are simple and will make accessing your Internet properties as hassle-free for consumers (and, more importantly, potential consumers) as possible.

For the last half decade, DomainsBot has been helping companies by providing an easy way for them to check the availabilty of potential domain names that they may want to use, which dramatically reduces the time spent searching for an unused domain name.

"Our goal is to simplify an important and time consuming process creatively," says DomainsBot CEO Emiliano Pasqualetti.

Social Media Takeover
Of course, anyone who is even a moderate Internet user can tell you that social media has completely altered the way that we use the Web. Now, many users will have their first encounters with brands on social networks, specifically Twitter or Facebook, and many consumers are conditioned to visit these profile pages more frequently than websites because they are easier to engage with and located on social networking sites that the users are already visiting regularly.

DomainsBot took note of this development, and it was the catalyst for the development and launch of the 2.0 version of its website. DomainsBot now offers "an innovative real-time search experience" that includes some new tools to search for not only domain names, but also Twitter handles and Facebook URLs. Ultimately, this will help brands establish unique online identities in a quick and efficient manner.

"Five years ago we only needed to worry about checking domain availability before naming a new business or product," says Pasqualetti. "Today's challenge is to take care of domains and social media identities."

Keeping Up with Google
A big part of the redevelopment of the DomainsBot technology revolved around meeting Google's new "Instant" feature. Now that the search giant displays relevant search results as words are typed into the search engine, DomainsBot will offer "a similar, real-time experience that gives users more control over results."

The new website is live now, and the new features have also been integrated into DomainsBot's mobile application.

Are you a Chump, or a Chi.mp?

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

chi.mp has finally exited its private beta, and it's a pretty good service for the time you must spend to get a site up and running and the value it potentially can provide.

chi.mp is branding itself as a service for owning and managing your online identity. chi.mp, which stands for "Content Hub & Identity Management Platform," allows chi.mp site owners to "bring the many facets of their digital lives together in one place that belongs to them." A pretty lofty goal but after testing it out, its ease of use might make the solution a feasible, genuine reality.

Web pros are going to jump at this: chi.mp offers a free .mp domain name. After registering, owners get to access their website, which includes Open ID, profiles, an activity stream, a blog, photo albums and tools to import content and contacts from across the Web. chi.mp also includes a contact management system they are dubbing the Ultimate Black Book, a tiered privacy tool called Personas and the ability to publish and push content to other services, like Twitter and Facebook. Most importantly, ownership of content and contacts is not in question. It all belongs to the chi.mp site owner.

“Content and social graphs should belong to the people who created them,” said Gib Bintliff, founder and CEO of chi.mp. “chi.mp owners can import their stuff into one place, mix and mash it, control who sees what, publish it, push it, and they shouldn’t lose ownership or control of it. If they want to export it, why not? It’s theirs. This is a big part of chi.mp’s core values and is reflected in chi.mp’s Owners’ Bill of Rights.”

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'Net Features : online identity

Search for an Online Identity

Are you a Chump, or a Chi.mp?