Whenever I shoot photos of people doing some sort of sporting activity (like shooting surfers in Hawaii, bike riders in Portland, etc), sometimes they come up to you later and ask if you are going to post any of the photos online, because they want to see themselves in the shots. I've had odd conversations about where to find the photos later ("Yeah, it's like the word flicker but without an e, then there is a slash, then…") and I've considered getting some Moo cards made up with my flickr URL, but I was thinking someone (either Flickr themselves or a couple coders with a google appspot account) should make a domain parking spot that simply forwards to your flickr stream (or any other single URL you specify). If it was priced around $20 a year, it'd be about the same as some Moo cards and I'm sure a single developer could support thousands of customers like me and clear some profit.
I'd love to tell a surfer or cyclist that they can see shots I take at say, "mattsphotos dot com" or something to that effect and have it resolve at my flickr spot.
A Whole Lotta Nothing 
Why can’t you buy the domain for $10 and have the free parking that just about every domain providers gives you forward to your flickr page or wherever?
Unless I’m missing something in your idea…
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I guess I’ve never seen an elegant and clean domain parking interface before from a registrar. I’ve seen some pretty hideous “Now redirecting…” and frames-based hacks that feature ads for the registrar, etc.
I was just thinking a totally transparent, set-it-and-forget-it way of doing it could be done and find a market.
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Could you not just register a short domain yourself and have it bounce to your photostream?
Or, just find a memorable short-url service and setup one to point to your photostream.
I know that’s not the big-picture service you mention, but it’d do for you.
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Maybe use HTTP Redirect rather than relying on something the host provides?
That should be clean and seamless.
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Dreamhost has a really good and flexible ad-free forwarding configuration. Presumably you could also host wholelottanothing.org there as well.
You could also just say “Go to a.wholelottanothing.org/photos” or something and have that redirect.
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Yeah, like, tinyURL lets you specify the URL part now. So for example.
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I’ve always had photos.tanglebones.com redirect to Flickr for just this reason.
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Or you could just give them a bit.ly! Here: http://bit.ly/mattsphotos
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Purchase a low cost domain name and point it to photos.wholelottanothing.org and from that domain you can control the redirect experience to Flickr.
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I see what everyone’s saying, but if you’ve ever been out in public talking to strangers, they’re not going to remember anything after “tiny U-R-L dot com slash…” and they’re not going to remember complicated domains (like wholelottanothing.org, haughey.com, metafilter.com, etc).
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I’m just suggesting pointing the domain to photos.wholelattanothing.org so that you control the redirect. Not that you would give that out as the URL.
You then buy mattsphotos.com or something easy to remember and edit the dns to point to your server. Then from that point you can redirect it anyway you want, and not be locked into an ugly redirect from your name host.
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I’m surprised Flickr hasn’t already integrated something similar into the Pro service. Seems like a logical step.
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You could try http://ihardlyknowher.com/mathowie not sure if that is easier to remember than the Flickr address though.
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I’d just register the domain, and use the register’s redirect options if they are decent.
I have checked out what GoDaddy offers which I use for my domains, but at work we recently started using the mydomain.com guys for name servers, as the domains are already registered with another company.
MyDomain’s interface isn’t great, but they offer the name server service for free, and they support lots of options, including direct and transparent redirects using HTTP headers.
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