In July, Yahoo began letting users set up wish lists for user names they’d like to have. As you may know, the company is giving away email addresses and user IDs from inactive accounts to people that actually still use Yahoo.
On Monday, the company announced that it has begun notifying users about the names they are getting. They also announced a new “watch list” feature, which lets you pay a couple bucks to be notified of names you’re interested becoming available in the future.
Google’s Matt Cutts saw the news, and posted this to Google+:
I hear that Yahoo is giving out recycled usernames starting today. I can't wait to see which of these names I got!
Obviously these names are references to keywords that are frequently targeted by spammers in Google’s search results. If Cutts can get [email protected], he can at least prevent someone else from using it (though I’m not sure how much that would really help with spam in Google).
I guess he hasn’t found out which (if any) of these he was able to get. He posted it about 24 hours ago, and has yet to update is.
Just for the hell of it, I sent an email to [email protected], and it bounced.
[via Search Engine Roundtable]