“Other than sheer luck, how do you know when a domain name like Facetime.com is transferred to another company?”
Although this question may have been more appropriate for DomainQuestions.com (hint, hint), I will answer it here because someone asked me this in response to my article about Apple’s acquisition of Facetime.com.
As I mentioned in my article, I can’t personally take credit for discovering the domain transfer, but my bet is that Mark was monitoring the domain name via the domain monitor tool at DomainTools. With the tool, you can monitor the domain status, a registrar change, expiration date changes, and nameserver changes.
Access to the tool is given to customers with a DomainTools account, even the free accounts. 100 domain names can be monitored if you have a free account, and up to 10,000 domain names can be monitored with the professional account level.
I believe I’ve written about this tool before, but it’s a great tool to use to keep your eye on important domain names, either for your own portfolio, to monitor competitors, or for voyeuristic reasons.
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Please help me raise funds for the Ronald McDonald House
One big tool that the domaintool cannot do is help me register domains that will be worth 1million USD in 4 weeks time.
The domain monitoring tools are very useful and I am a happy user of it. One thing to keep in mind when looking at the service, the monitoring notices are typically 4-5 days behind that actual changes, depending on when their database updates. If you are looking for trigger signals, this lag may not be useful for that.
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Sometimes the domain changes are MONTHS behind the actual changes.
Often, the domain data are incomplete or just plain unavailable.
I wouldn’t put too much trust in this tool.
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Thank you for the post Elliot!
@Ms Domainer – I would like to have more information about the issues and discrepancies you have had with the Domain Monitor service we offer. We are always wanting to make our services better and more accurate. Any feedback you are willing to share would be helpful! Please send them to memberservices domaintools.com
thank you,
Susan Prosser
VP Product & Marketing
DomainTools
You can have you own domain monitor
http://tinymonitor.com/domain-monitor
With Tiny Domain Monitor you can also monitor the domain status, a registrar change, expiration date changes, nameserver changes, and other domain data updates. This tool also generates RSS feed so you can track domains with your feed reader.