Branding Us
Posted on:: January 16th, 2003
Subscribers to AT&T broadband are having their email addresses switched for the third time in a year. Now they’ll be [email protected].
My guess is that there is no technical reason why the domain names are being switched. Rather, Comcast is using its customers as vehicles for its “brand. This is the clearest example I’ve seen of the confluence of the marketing and cattle farmer’s sense of “branding.”
Categories: Uncategorized dw
Larry Lessig
As much I’d like to just make fun of ATT here, there’s actually a more important issue around all the changing they do. In the membership organization I work for, one of the biggest hurdles to getting the group online has been the sense among the members (especially the many elderly ones) that they can’t figure out the web and email. When mediaone.com become attbi.com, it literally caused months of email problems for the membership and, consequently, for me. I lost hours of work time and cost the organization probably lots of money explaining what to their email address meant, or how to reach their colleagues. All of this was greatly compounded by the multiple breakdowns in ATT’s own servers, which were supposed to be redirecting the old addresses but stopped doing so then started misdirecting messages instead.
Sorry to ramble on so long, but my point is that companies like ATT (and, to a greater extent, AOL) are often the only game in town. Subscribers, many of them already wary of the web, many of them elderly, or not particularly tech-savvy, use them because they recognize the name–it’s the same as their phone bill, after all. No wonder the people I work with don’t trust email when their introduction to it is via such an unstable, unreliable interface. And how am I supposed to convince the elderly, recalcitrantly pen-and-paper membership I represent that yes, email is useful and reliable, when this kind of thing keeps happening?
This is precisely why I do not use my attbi (I guess it is now comcast) email address, but instead have moved to getting my own email account based on my own domain name. Not only does it free me from this type of game from my ISP, it also allows me to change ISPs without needing to update others on any change in my email address. I recommend this approach to others all the time.
JoKeR has the right idea. NameSecure.com will sell you domain name registration for $15/year (or $12/year on multi-year registrations), which INCLUDES free email and web forwarding. I’ve used their service for over five years now without a hitch. Get your own domain name; it’s the only way to fly.