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Use FB.com to Shorten Vanity URLs

Elliot Silver
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4

Facebook.It looks like Facebook is already putting its FB.com to good use, and it’s not just for internal corporate email addresses. Visitors and companies can now use FB.com to shorten vanity URLs for corporate and personal pages.

Instead of visiting a page like Facebook.com/DogWalking, you can now visit FB.com/DogWalking, and you’ll end up on the same page. Similarly, you can visit FB.com/MarkZuckerberg or whatever the vanity URL is.

This may not seem like such a big deal since it only saves 6 letters, but in a world of 140 character tweets and short updates, it’s probably going to big deal to some people.

Thanks to George for the tip.

Facebook Introduces “Social Inbox” & SocialInbox.com Recently Sold to HubSpot

Elliot Silver
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13

Facebook.Mark Zuckerberg is currently discussing the new Facebook email system, and although he mentioned that everyone will receive @Facebook.com email addresses, it seems that the FB.com domain name which was recently acquired by Facebook, will be used for internal emails.

One very interesting tidbit that Zuckerberg just announced is the introduction of the Social Inbox for “filtering exactly the messages that you want to see.” I was curious to see if Facebook had acquired the matching SocialInbox.com domain name.

According to a Whois lookup, SocialInbox.com is currently registered to the Escrow Transfer department at Sedo, meaning it was sold very recently. DN Journal reported that SocialInbox.com sold for $4,970 at the end of September.

Interestingly, it looks like a company called HubSpot has launched a new service on SocialInbox.com, which is in Beta. According to the meta description for the site, “Social Inbox is a simple tool for professionals to more effectively use social sites like twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to find and nurture prospects and leads.”

If Facebook ends up branding this new “Social Inbox,” did they just get preempted by another company by just a couple of months?

Earn $5,000 from Overstock for Software Developer Referral

Elliot Silver
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1

I just saw something on Overstock’s homepage that I thought I would share with you in case you know someone looking for work. According to the company CEO, “we have more good ideas than we have folks to build them.” Sounds like a problem familiar to many domain investors!

If you happen to know a software developer looking for work and you’re interesting in making $5,000, have them send an email to  javajob@overstock.com and have him or her  include your name and the email address associated with your Overstock.com account. If your  referral  is hired and stays with the company for at least 90 days, you’ll get paid. More details on the Overstock website.

Some of the open positions at Overstock include:

  • Senior Software Developer
  • Software Developer II
  • Software Developer I
  • Software Developer in Test
  • Software Tester
  • Senior Software Tester

Sunday Update

Elliot Silver
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3

Today is a straight up lazy football watching day. If I do anything but watch football and maybe answer some emails, I will be a bit disappointed in myself. Here are some Sunday updates.

– The Chocolate Show I went to was not what I expected. I hate waiting in line for anything, but I ended up waiting in line for 45 minutes to get in (wouldn’t have waited if my wife wasn’t there). It was crowded inside and was not really much of a tradeshow. I didn’t even mention my domain name to anyone.

– So far so good on DomainQuestions.com. Lots of traffic producing good questions and answers. I need to work on some spam issues though… I have been deleting them as I see them though but it’s annoying to deal with. If you have any questions, comments, bugs, or any feedback about the site, please let me know.

– It might not be that smart of me considering this is what I do for a living, but I don’t really follow the activities of ICANN. George Kirikos of Leap of Faith Financial Services does follow ICANN closely, and he provided some comments on the DAGv5, which was supposedly the final version. All I can say is what a clusterf**k this seems to have become.

– I heard Andrew’s Austin Domainer meetup was a lot of fun. Wish I could have been there, but maybe next year.

– With TRAFFIC San Francisco and Domain Roundtable in Nassau happening in March, I think many people will have to choose one or the other. If you’ve thought about it, which conference are you more likely to attend?

Fox Rothschild Website Needs WWW Redirect

Elliot Silver
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1

The father of one of my best friends was featured in a newspaper article this morning about being a state powerbroker. A couple of years ago at a dinner, I told him he  should own his exact match domain name, so I bought it on his behalf and forwarded it to his attorney profile at Fox Rothschild, one of the nation’s best known law firms.

After reading today’s article, I wanted to make sure that his domain name was still forwarding correctly, and I was perplexed (and slightly embarrassed) when I saw that the domain name forwarded to an error page.  The domain name had previously resolved to his profile, but that was no longer the case this morning.

I did some checking, and it turns out that at some point in time Fox Rothschild stopped redirecting its WWW traffic to the website. Instead of a redirect if visitors forgot the www or if someone linked to the site sans www, all traffic that doesn’t have www goes to an error page that says “The page cannot be displayed Explanation: There is a problem with the page you are trying to reach and it cannot be displayed.”

This is a common error for webmasters, and it’s something we all need to think about when developing our websites. I already added the www to the domain forward, so his domain name resolves correctly now.  Hopefully someone from Fox Rothschild will fix this error ASAP. Time to check on your websites to make sure you’ve got it covered.

Overstock International to Rebrand as O.CO

Elliot Silver
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29

OverstockI was speaking with a friend on the phone after my post about FB.CO, and it was mentioned that Overstock has indicated that the company will rebrand its International websites as O.CO. There is a small reference “soon to be O.co” below its logo.  At the present time, O.CO forwards to the Overstock website.

I think this could be very big for the .CO Registry, domain registrars selling .CO domain names, domain investors who have .CO domain names, and companies who have built websites on .CO domain names. The key to any TLD’s success is consumer awareness and that comes most rapidly when large brands actually use the extension rather than have it simply be a forwarder or other form of brand protection.

If Overstock actually “uses” O.CO and doesn’t just forward O.CO to something like Overstock.com/international, this will be very big news since Overstock is one of the more popular brands online.

I’ve mentioned this a number of times, but as a disclaimer my company owns a grand total of 6 .CO domain names (Bahamas.CO, cmm.CO, Elliot.CO, Torah.CO, Another.CO, and Beeb.CO), and .CO has been an advertiser.

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