If you are tired of not having the perfect username that identifies you and is available on all social networks, this program will solve the dilemma very quickly.
Anyone who has ever been interested in using social media as more than just a personal message board has faced the same problem. If you only use social media to talk to friends and little else, your username usually won’t matter. But if you intend to have a public profile that others can easily find, whether because you want to be an influencer, because your job requires the use of social media, because you are a business owner, content creator or artist, you know that your username is very important.
Often the username itself functions as a stage name on the Internet. It may also be that you already have a stage name as a singer, actor, or even a journalist, and you need your username to be as similar to this as possible.
If you have multiple networks, such as a YouTube or Twitch channel, TikTok profile, and Instagram profile, it’s important that your username is the same or very similar on all of them, so that others can easily find you.
But at this point, after many years of social media and platforms reigning, usernames seem to have run out, and it is rare to find an ideal one that is free on all the social networks we are interested in. That is why the ‘Sherlock’ tool, available for free on GitHub, can be of great help.
Sherlock is a program that is already included in some Linux distros, and that allows you to check the availability of a username on almost 400 social networks at once. This way, you can keep trying until you find one that no one has, or that is free on the platforms you want to use, and thus you will have found a new nickname or nickname that is perfect for your digital self, or for your company.
Actually, it is a program originally designed for OSINT, that is, to investigate people using information publicly available on the Internet, but you can use it for what we discuss here. The most difficult part, however, is the installation process, although it is enough to follow a few steps.
If you are not used to using the command line, the way of handling the program will seem strange to you, since it is done that way. But it is not difficult to get the hang of it, and you have all the instructions on GitHub. The huge list of social networks it is able to track is also on their website.
Available for Linux, macOS or Windows
You can use it on all of these operating systems, although the installation method varies:
On an Apple computer, you will need to install it via Homebrew. Type in the search engine “brew install sherlock” and look for the version compatible with your version of macOS. If you are a Linux user, it is very likely that you already know how to download it, although in fact, it comes preinstalled in several distros. On Windows, on the other hand, you will have to download and install it using pipx, a package manager for Python scripts. You can find all the information on its repository on GitHub.
