Why I don’t use gmail, yet at least
I have had good success in maintaining consistency in my username across all online sites. You can find me most anywhere as “atulapatel” or “atulapatel@yahoo.com”. I’m a legacy Yahoo user and continue to use it as my email and username hub.
However, I was not as successful at some very important places — Gmail and Hotmail. I do log into each service as atulapatel@yahoo.com, and Google even provided me with goog.atulapatel@gmail.com, but that’s not enough. In the frenzy of the Gmail invitations, I believe individuals invited themselves over and over again and signed up for as many iterations of their name as possible. I, unfortunately, was left behind. And, with Hotmail, I have a strange feeling I actually do own that address. But, I cannot seem to answer the security question correctly. I may have lied about that information back in the mid 90s when I lied about everything when registering online.
It is unfortunate because I would love to explore replacing my Yahoo with either Gmail (advanced searching) and Hotmail (IMAP accessible), but I have an obsessive need to own the “atulapatel” username or I will most likely not use the service. It’s a twist to the usual adoption issues such as features and functionality, ease of use, need of use. My adoption usually depends on if I can obtain “atulapatel”.
For this reason, I have emailed atulapatel@gmail.com and atulapatel@hotmail.com offering to buy the names from them. Given that I have yet to receive even a courteous decline, I believe these are both dormant accounts.
If there is anyone at Google or Microsoft that can steal these names for me, I’m willing to pay some big bucks. Maybe someone needs to start an exchange where individuals can buy and sell usernames.
