This has probably happened to you: You hear about some cool new app or game or service, rush to sign up, and discover that another person has already snagged the username you wanted. It's a bummer and a bad first impression for a new service.()The username just wasn't built to withstand what the Internet has become. It's a vestige of an earlier era, when a large service had thousands of users. Today, despite the billions of people online, we're still designing for the sparse old days. ()"In the late '90s, I would have thought MetaFilter might have like 10,000 users max," says Matt Haughey, creator of the popular online community. Haughey was also an early designer for Blogger, one of the first democratized online publishing platforms. "For Blogger, I thought, this is pretty amazing, and wouldn't it be great if millions of people used it? I thought, someday we might reach 5 million or so.
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