As more and more of our communications and interactions take place online, retaining a consistent online identity (or, you know, "handle" in old-school geek speak) across multiple sites can be really, really useful. Of course, wanting to maintain a consistent identity and actually being able to get the same user name for every single web service you use are two entirely different things.

If you have a long-existing online identity, you might have all the big services covered, but if you are launching a new site or service (or you just want to lose that ridiculous IM name from high school that seemed funny in 1998 when you were 15, but is now just really, really lame), deciding on a name, and finding out if it is available across services can be a chore.

This is where the new service namechk comes to the rescue. Just enter in your desired user name and namechk will go through 100 of the biggest web services and see where your desired username is available.

I've been using either "film_girl" or "filmgirl" (if underscores aren't an accepted character) as my online identity for at least eight years, thus it, was kind of neat to see how many accounts that are registered under those names actually belong to me (most of them).

If you are about to launch or relaunch your online identity, using namechk to see what's available isn't a bad way to ensure consistency.