Honestly it all started innocently enough. Some friends on Facebook were posting this video from Google.
Its part of they started telling online a short while ago. If you haven’t checked out the rest of the Chrome videos I suggest you do, they are clever, fun and like “Dear Sophie” emotional.
I’m not one for being overly emotional, yet this video stung me in the right places, my love for my daughter Emily and technology. The understatement that this video was just another few minutes spent on You Tube would be just that, an understatement.
Upon completion as I attempted not to get all choked up at work. I fired up my .ca registrar and secured my kids personal .ca domain. This got me to thinking. As a parent I’m often thinking of ways to introduce technology into my kids life in a meaningful way. I’ve long been saying that Emily will learn to type not on a keyboard, but in fact; the visualization of what a keyboard is. Her concept of computer input isn’t necessarily a mouse, but the gestural nature of iPhones and iPads. But lets save that for another post. Back to grabbing digital usernames, emails and domains for kids who don’t really understand what they are.
The concepts of email addresses, .com’s and twitter handles escape kids. However, as a parent should you collect these things when they don’t matter to your kid so that when they do you can have them ready? For me I am going to say yes. Maybe for selfish reasons and obvious reasons but reasons none the less.
yourkidsname.domain
It’s true, Emily has no real daily use for having her own domain… or does she. Shortly after registering her.ca I found myself with options of what to do next. It’s true that in her future she might not have much use for her own personal domain. But what if she becomes famous? What if she becomes a photographer and wants to show off her work. In 10-15 years from now will she go to register a .ca and not be able to since somebody else did before her? I believe that the investment now can prevent what happened to me… I don’t own my own .com, I do own my own .ca (thankfully I’m Canadian) If I only had the foresight to grab the .com before somebody else. It’s a silly regret yes, but one that for 20$ a year I can nab up for Emily. Even if she never uses it, I know its there.
For now her domain will serve as a way to get in touch with her parents and subsequently her. Emily recently finished her first year of school, and while its nice to have phone numbers for parents I barely know, she connects mostly with her peers via paper notes. So why not make a little paper note with her email on it so parents can arrange playmates. You say an email for a kid? I digress, this first year of school was full of firsts and one thing that has changed from when I was a kid was the birthday invitation, now I’m RSVPing via email to kids parents and having lists of gift suggestions emailed to me, this is perfect and seemingly so perfect for parents of other kids. Why can this extend to emailing kids about playmates? It should.
Your kid on a social network.
For now, Emily is absent from any other network online save for twitter. My reason for this is that I want to use twitter as her way of learning to compose messages to a void, get her comfortable with posting short bursts of her personality. It might break some rules along the way but that doesn’t seem to have stopped even some of the twitter founders from getting their own kids on twitter. Plus it took close to 15 minutes to get a proper handle for Emily. Who surprisingly was quite picky as to what would pass and not pass when it came to deciding on a username.
What next?
For me the big crux for getting Emily online was having an email, sure I could have set up a gmail account for her (and I still might) but I like the personality that comes with having your own domain. Granted the nerd in me will eventually route her email through Google apps 
I think for now she’s pretty set up and I’ll enjoy the years ahead when I know that I’ll be collecting usernames along the way, just in case. More importantly I’ll really enjoy the collection of memories she gets to create and that’s the magical part for me, most parents would agree.
