Brave Tech World

October 23, 2006

    If you look at (almost) all viral websites they are viral because the user feel some type of association with its content and wants to distribute it to his/her friends. If you look at YouTube, Blogger, Flickr and many more, you will see a common thread. All of them allow users to set up their "address", you know, a link that uniquely identifies that person.

    Now, I'm always surprised on how some websites setup that unique address. There is a undeniable grading system on how bad it can be, which I list below, starting at the worst and moving to the best:

7) http://company.com/useless/morestupid.htm?user-id=123735
This is the classic Dynamic URL where the user id is a parameter on the query string of the URL. This is bad for two reasons. First, you are now officially called "123735". Second, this is not friendly to search engines.

6) http://company.com/useless/123735/
At least this one fixes the dynamic query string and converts it to a single URL path.

5) http://company.com/123735
Smaller is always better because you can help users remember without having to copy and paste the link every time.

4) http://company.com/useless/username/
Ok, now we are getting into a more Web2.0-ish style. You setup your user name (and if the site is not very popular, you probably don't need to use john734).

 

3) http://company.com/username/
Why the useless virtual directory? Figure out a way to the username be the first virtual path, or, better yet...

2) http://username.company.com/
Just use the username as part of the domain. That certainly gives users a sense of ownership.

1) http://userdomain.com/
Now, that is the real deal. Although, this is going to cost the user some money to setup.

     If you are starting a company today, make sure it uses either #1 and #2, but not #3 or worse. And #1 and #2 would be better if they are provided together, this way users that want their own .COM domain name can have it, but it is not a mandatory thing like with virtually all web hosting companies.

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