Jun 15
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Choose your own email through AOL

Got an email today from AOL. It told me that if I wanted a custom email address of my choice, they’d provide it for me. So AOL is now giving away emails that don’t end in AOL.com? Interesting!

I decided to give it a try. If you go to domains.aol.com, you can check to see of your desired domain is free. If it is, AOL will kick in the 8 bucks or so to register it for you. Then you can invite up to 100 people to join you on that new domain. So now, thanks to AOL, you can email me at IThink@EducatorsAreCool.com.

Now this may seem pretty cool, but I do wonder whether this is in some sense a scam by AOL to get registered every desirable domain name that hasn’t been registered yet. Let the masses identify the good ones for you, and then AOL owns all the domains. What happens if you decide you want to put up a website at that domain? Doesn’t look like you can. It seems as though EducatorsAreCool.com is going to take you to an AOL profile page for the account. So I guess AOL.com is branching out to a domain near you.

While that feels a little goofy to me, I do dig the fact that they’ll give you a custom domain name for free. Well, I guess there’s still a price, it just isn’t monetary.

Oh yeah, if you want an EducatorsAreCool.com email address, I have 100 invitations left :)


Author: Steve

1 Comment(s)

Michael Eakes
6/16/2007

Hi there, this “free” domain name is a very interesting development.

I couldn’t resist looking up your domain name record in whois:

Domain Name: educatorsarecool.com
Registrant:
AOL LLC
22000 AOL Way
Dulles, VA 20166
US

Your creative choice for a domain name is now, in fact, owned by AOL, and probably always will be. I would definitely recommend avoiding building an identity or site with a name that you do not own, because you will never be able to take it away from AOL. The more you pass out that email address, the more you are locked-in, and the more unlikely you are to ever leave AOL because of the growing inconvenience of losing your email address.

And even if they ever did let you put “your own site” up, it would be subject to AOL’s terms, and surely they would monetize your traffic if it was popular.

I recently wrote some steps to create (and completely own)
email at your own domain
on my blog.

Best,
Michael

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