It's not a wise idea to use your name as a username across forums, online portals and areas of discussion. Primarily for the reason that it's way too easy to run a Google search on your online activity and find out what you've been up to during the day. You'll also want to try and keep the same username across various social networking sites. However, finding and choosing a consistent username is far from easy. Try making up something using your name and you'll find it is taken. Try choosing your favourite movie or TV star and that username will be used, too.

Namechk is an online tool that you can use to search for username availability across various popular sites across the Internet. The only downside with this approach is that you can't type in a core name and for the site to recommend some possible usernames that you can use across the web. Still, it gives you a chance to test various usernames for availability.

Namechk link.

03 Apr 2009