A Consideration

I've been thinking for a long time (and by a long time I mean about a week, if even that long) about an interesting business venture.
SPOILER ALERT: this is going to be a classic example of why I'm not a business savvy person; I'm going to just announce a genius, unclaimed idea into an open area (the internet) and give no thought or guard against those that could steal the aforementioned idea.
So, here it goes. AOL Instant Messenger (or AIM for the extreme web geeks who will want me to abbreviate) is by far the easiest and most popular way to instant message friends, family, and those that you are currently stalking. One thing I noticed was, due to the widespread popularity of this free service, many people have (since AIM's inception) racked up quite a few screen names. I, myself, have gone through about seven (including my current and hopefully final one, SecretOfGabriel). Multiply this by even half the number of people that use the service, and you have a hefty amount of screen names already taken. And we're talking ACCESSIBLE, easy to REMEMBER screen names. Not the ones with a clever name stuck in the middle of random words or numbers; not the ones where they couldn't get the real name on their first try so numbers are substituted for letters (example = B33RL0V35M3). I mean quality, simple names. Sadly, there is currently no real market for these used screen names. They just get cast to the wayside, apparently never to be used again. Well my idea is that I start making them, or buying them off of people, and just selling the suckers on eBay. Or somewhere.
Granted, there are currently TWO sellers on eBay that are doing what I'm talking about. But it seems they only have the one screen name to sell, and they're both pretty crappy names to begin with. So apparently this some virtually non-existant competition in this market. I'm not a bad screen name creator. I've come up with such classics as SpartanMascot and CrappyActor, I could surely come up with many more and sell them to make some decent pocket change. And the best thing is that it requires no shipping or anything, you just wipe the name clean, tell everyone on the buddy list "See ya later" and sell the password for some scratch. Then, just when you think it can't get any better, there are expansion possibilities. I've noticed that names for blogs run the same course. For instance, I recently changed my name on MySpace to Dangerous Angel, so I did a quick search to see if anyone had a blog by that name. Well, it turns out that some jerk weed does have a site. Which would be okay, normally. I mean, he seems pretty intelligent, and was writing the beginning of some interesting work. But he just stopped. After ONE entry. And this was TWO YEARS AGO. So that domain has just been sitting there for all that time (and when you consider that blogs only became popular around 1999 or 2000, this is almost half the blogging history that this thing has remained dormant). The sky is the limit. We can begin taking advantage of these free services whenever we want! So hey, if anyone wants in on this idea before it takes off, just let me know (it will be a definite plus for you if you know of any screen names already that people may be willing to part with).

So sayeth The Brad...