Mike wrote on Wednesday about Paypal rolling out Paypal.me and your chance to reserve a novelty name that will be associated with your account. It is important to note you can’t change it once you pick it.
The Daily Dot covered name squatting taking place and while some celebrity names got taken others got reserved like Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift. Politicians did not get reserved status.
From the article:
PayPal.Me opened up with basically every possible URL available to any enterprising user. Of course, the rush wasn’t to lock up one’s own name but instead to grab the names of celebrities and public figures.
Interestingly, people outside of the United States quickly laid claim to the usernames of American politicians. The account paypal.me/donaldtrump belongs to someone in Toronto, Canada, while /hillaryclinton, /berniesanders, and /obama have all been claimed by users in the United Kingdom.
Meanwhile, /TedCruz, /JebBush, and /BenCarson are all occupied by Americans. Those accounts will assuredly be used in campaign ads at some point.
Scott Walker is the only politician who can claim that his full-name URL actually belongs to him. But /ScottWalker isn’t the Wisconsin governor and conservative presidential candidate—it’s a Canadian politician of the same name, which is a perfect bit of irony for the politician who suggested building a wall at the U.S.–Canadian border.
While politicians’ names went fast on PayPal.Me, they weren’t the only people to fall victim to the open URL format. /Kanye and /JayZ have been scooped up, as has /TomCruise (by Buzzfeed’s Katie Notopoulos). Someone in Turkey grabbed the URL for YouTube celebrity PewDiePie.
Here are some availables if you have not gotten your name yet, I was searching for awhile deciding on which name I wanted. I ended up going with Yar which I used for many things over the last 20 years, the simple reverse spelling of Ray.
Currently available:
- domainsales
- brokerage
- bruins for you Boston or UCLA fans
- tlds
- gtld
- traders
- writers
- films
- rocker
- tigers
- bears
- lions
- fantasysports
- payee
- investors
- gamers
- content I was leaning toward this as creating content
- consultants
- domaininvesting
- domaininvestor
- cowboys
- smash
- LLLL
- NNNN
Single short memorable generic is better than celebrity … see a bunch of legal scuffles coming up in the future
Agree that’s a waste of time resulting in no upside and only downside. JayZ would sue thehell out of Paypal if people get duped thinking they sending him money.
The most ridiculous thing is they didn’t think about reserving the names like “login” or “signup”
This is not some tiny startup by college students. This is multibillion dollar corporation with probably hundreds of people working on launching this.
it’s not even about squatters – it’s a security issue…
@sex reserved by Paypal)
This product launch was not well thought out. I’d go so far as to call it dangerously amateurish. PayPal doesn’t even own PayPalMe.com. This is a phisher’s wet dream.
I agree Bill. Very poorly done.
Mini wild west of names. It will be curious to see if this actually will result in people a) getting sued and b) for generics, people trying to buy pay pal accounts.
Great point!
Definitely lots of weak points.
It might not be a fishers dream because you’re going to see the name of the person that you’re sending the money to and where they live.