Last week we made some improvements to our Personal Names Service that focused on two areas – search and email.

On the search side, we’ve made it smarter in a couple of ways. First, you can now use our bulk tools to query the Personal Names database. So, if you wanted to see how many of your customers have a personal names match, our bulk lookup tool can tell you immediately. Simply dump the list of names into the ‘bulk availability’ check using syntax firstname.lastname. You will then get a full list of available names.

Our Personal Names search now also recognizes popular short forms and nicknames, too. For example, entering ‘Robert’ will now also return results for ‘Bob’. This improvement has been made to both RWI and API search.

On the email side, we’re removing the ‘forwarding only’ option and providing all accounts with a full mailbox. You can still enable forwarding for that full mailbox if you wish. A new ‘webmail only’ option is now also available.

If you haven’t checked out our Personal Names Service, now is the time. There is a very real desire among consumers to secure an online personal identity; the extremely successful launch of .ME and renewed interest in .NAME demonstrate that. Our Personal Names are even ’stickier’ because they’re not available anywhere else, they’re based on the most popular surnames in the world, they include both email and a web address, and they’re as affordable as a regular domain name. You can find more information on Personal Names here: http://opensrs.com/personalnames/

The image is from a detail of artist Jim Dine’s painting “Name Painting (1935-1963) #1″ (1968). Thanks to Flickr user Eric Wilcox for making his photo available under a Creative Commons license.

As a company that powers the services of many large web hosting and ISPs, we are acutely aware of how competitive these areas can be. In fact, one of the most frequently asked questions I receive from our customers is, “how do I make my company stand out?” Historically, the answer has largely been price, service and marketing. While these factors will always be important, I’m extremely excited to introduce a new service that will give Tucows resellers another competitive edge.

It’s our Personal Names Service and it’s all about giving people the chance to own their own name.

In 2006, we purchased a Colorado-based company named NetIdentity, which has an extremely successful service offering email and web addresses based on some of the most popular surnames in the world. These names include Smith, Johnson, Brown, Chavez and nearly 40,000 other names. All told, about 66 percent of the population of the United States will find a match for their name in the portfolio.

Today, I’m extremely excited to introduce a wholesale version based on this model, which we’re calling our Personal Names Service. This service lets our resellers offer email and web addresses based on our extensive portfolio of surnames. Each name purchased includes:

• An email account, powered by the Tucows Email Service, which includes our easy-to-use AJAX webmail, forwarding and anti-spam/anti-virus.
• A-Record and CNAME control, allowing users to host these domains wherever they like.
• Management for both email and DNS within OpenSRS, our domain name management platform.

Our Resellers are free to offer this service as an extension of their existing offerings, or even introduce a completely new “identity”-based service. I’d strongly encourage our resellers to look seriously at offering this service for a number of reasons:

• It gels well with the existing offerings.
• It’s available to Tucows Resellers only, giving them an advantage over many of their competitors.
• With close to 40,000 popular surnames in our database, the majority of their customer’s names will be available.
• It taps into the very real desire for high-quality domain names as consumers seek to secure a personal digital identity.
• It’s extremely affordable.

This is a great opportunity to get on board with a trend that will gain huge popularity in 2008. If you’re a Tucows reseller, be sure to check out the service. And if you’re not a Tucows reseller, sign up today!