The Death of Domain Parking? 296
An anonymous reader found an article about the former CEO of MySpace moving into the domain parking biz. He says "I thought, it can't be that easy. So I talked to some domainers, and they said, 'We own 300,000 domains, we make $20 million a year, we have just four employees and some servers in the Caymans.'" The idea behind the business doesn't really seem any better to me than just having a parked name with a banner ad. At least, not for the internet as a whole.
This comment parked (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This comment parked (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:This comment parked (Score:4, Insightful)
One can only hope. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's only sense to know that there will forever be garbage, and that we will forever be looking for ways to sort through that garbage for the good stuff.
Looking at it, you'd think that domain parking wouldn't be half as profitable as it is. We clearly need to work harder on our search engines.
Re:One can only hope. (Score:5, Insightful)
Given that the real source of traffic for these sites has nothing to do with search engines (it comes from people typing stuff directly into the location bar of the browser), I doubt that that would be productive.
Re:One can only hope. (Score:5, Interesting)
Furthermore, most people search for websites rather than type them in the location bar because they usually don't know exactly what they're looking for. If parked domains only made their earnings from direct hits, I suspect it would not be nearly as profitable.
Re:One can only hope. (Score:5, Insightful)
I corrected your comment for you. I have seen numerous people who don't really understand what a web browser is who try to type what you and I would call search queries into the address bar. Parked domains and phishing sites target those users who simply don't know any better. Beyond that, there are parked domains with names similar to every single popular website on the internet. I seem to remember Craigslist.com being a porn site. The other day I was looking for "Curse Gaming" to download some WoW addons and sure enough, cursedgaming.net, cursegaming.net, cursedgaming.com, etc. all came up with webpages. Luckily Google is smart enough and by searching for "Cursed Gaming" I got "Curse Gaming" which is what I needed. Oddly enough, all those subtle iterations on the domain don't show up as results on Google.
Re:One can only hope. (Score:5, Interesting)
Me: OK, go to www.dimspace.com
Them: OK, I'll search for that. I'm on Yahoo.
Me: No, just type it into the location bar.
Them: What? I'll search for it here. OK, which one is it? Should I click on the top link.
Me: (resigned) Yeah, I guess... (mumble something underneath my breath about how cousins should not be allowed to marry)
People get stuck in their ways. Heck, some people can't even accept that there are sites that don't begin with "www". Tell them to go to "mail.yahoo.com" and they'll go to "www.yahoo.com" and stare blankly at that over-crowded page searching for the "mail" link. As Ross Perot used to say, it's just sad.
Re:One can only hope. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:One can only hope. (Score:5, Funny)
Hahahahahaaaa. I run into that type of person quite frequently too. The young, ditzy, personal assistants often seem to fall into that category. "I went to the link you told me to go to and it isn't working. You know, www.mail....." , "No, LISTEN you stupid bitch! There is no fucking WWW." .... Sorry, had a flashback there.
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Them: OK, I'll search for that. I'm on Yahoo.
Absolutely. But the funniest part is the way they say it. "I'm on Yahoo," with that subtle tone indicating they fully expect your next question to be wondering aloud what year they graduated from MIT.
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Re:One can only hope. (anecdotal) (Score:5, Informative)
Searching for "Kona Caldera" just pulls what appears to be an infinite number of shops
http://www.kona.com/ [kona.com] - Hawian island.
http://www.konabikes.com/ [konabikes.com] - parked, knows Kona are a cycle manufacturer and hosts loads on links, but none to Kona's site.
http://www.konacycles.com/ [konacycles.com] - parked with adsense links of no specific type.
Turns out its http://www.konaworld.com/ [konaworld.com] but the site is just a shop with no more details than other shops.
And that, folks, is how parking works. It relies on all the chaff generated by online sellers causing searchers to try more direct methods of getting at the information.
Re:One can only hope. (anecdotal) (Score:5, Interesting)
I had friends who had a non profit web site and they missed a renewal, the domain was immediately grabbed by porn spammers and they even used the site's original graphics. The generated site was probably entirely automated.
With the money spammers are making, you have to wonder what they are doing behind the scenes to shore up their position. They are completely amoral as long as the money keeps rolling in.
The web could become as useless as email. Soon we'll need a turing test for each letter typed.
Re:One can only hope. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Mozilla did it right (Score:4, Informative)
right click on any search box and choose "add a keyword for this search"
for example, if you add a keyword for google's search box, and call it 'g' then you can just type 'g ' and it will feed those search words into google.
Re:One can only hope. (Score:5, Insightful)
AsbesDot (Score:5, Funny)
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If you're paying Google $1500/month in advertising, do you really want your ad to show up on some parked domain that came up because someone can't spell microsoft.com?
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moolah (Score:3, Interesting)
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Advertisements aren't always a bad thing.
I do have adblock installed, but I use blocking judiciously. I only block advertisers that are instrusive or obstructive. If the ads don't hassle me, I don't mind seeing the ad on the off-chance that it may
Not 'right' or 'wrong,' just not interested. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is besides the point; it's not about the inherent "rightness" or "wrongness" of ads, it's about whether people want them as part of their browsing experience or not, and whether the technology can deliver that. I think it's safe to say that, given the choice, most people would choose no ads over ads, therefore it would make sense that a browser give them that.
If a whole lot of people wanted white-on-black text, browsers would probably implement that, too. It's not an issue of whether white-on-black is inherently superior to black-on-white, it's just consumer demand.
The Firefox developers are choosing to pass up what could be a big boost to its popularity, because they don't want to give people something that I suspect most people want, or would find useful. I suspect it's because the Firefox project and the Firefox developers themselves draw revenue from advertising, and don't want to cut it off (or come under fire from people who's revenues might be impacted). To put it bluntly, it's a conflict of interest -- I'm not judging them for that, because it may be a necessary consequence of staying afloat as an organization -- but they have goals other than producing "the best browser" possible, which prevent them from putting in such a feature.
It's the same reason that TiVOs don't have automatic commercial skipping, even though such a thing would be possible to implement (and other projecs like MythTV do), and most people would probably think it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. There are other considerations on the part of the manufacturer, which trump what would be best for the consumer.
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So basically, you're saying Firefox has a conflict of interest because they didn't include a plugin you like by default? I could understand calling it a conflict of interest if Firefox somehow prevented the adblock plugin from
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There would undoubtedly be some wrangling over who's list got to be the default, or at the top of the
Re:One can only hope. (Score:5, Interesting)
The way that domain parkers make their money is mainly through mistakes. For instance, if I buy reallykickasssite.com for a future project, a domain parker is going to come in and register reallykickasssite.net, reallykickasssite.org, and reallykickasssite.info in the hopes that my site will become popular and someone will accidentally type in the wrong TLD. Then there are ones that are mispellings, like foogle.com or yahooo.net or something.
Hell, sometimes they don't even wait for you to register it. I've gone to do domain checks at GoDaddy for a domain I might want to use, decide to mull it over, and come back the next week to buy it only to find that some company got it and parked an ad site there. I have no idea how they know that I checked on it, but they somehow get it on a list and snap it up.
What's worse, though, is that they hold on to these forever, so you can't just wait for their registration to expire. A domain is fairly cheap, so it's not a huge drain on them. And I know of no way to purchase it from them, either. If you have some sort of trademark or copyright, you could probably wrestle it from them through lawyers, but beyond that you're likely SOL.
I've learned my lesson, though. If I ever get an idea for a domain, and check to see if it's open, I'm going to buy that domain if it is. It's only $8-$10, and if I decide I don't want it I just turn off auto-renew.
GoDaddy has this thing where you pay $20, and when the domain becomes available they'll buy it for you and put it under your name. Has anyone tried this service and had it work? I have a sneaking suspicion that they are the ones doing the parking themselves (that's where I do most of my domain checks), and just trying to get another $10 out of you for the domain.
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I've heard of that before as well; it was down to the registrar. GoDaddy has just been added to my "do not use" list.
Re:One can only hope. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:One can only hope. (Score:5, Informative)
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Hell, sometimes they don't even wait for you to register it. I've gone to do domain checks at GoDaddy for a domain I might want to use, decide to mull it over, and come back the next week to buy it only to find that some company got it and parked an ad site there. I have no idea how they know that I checked on it, but they somehow get it on a list and snap it up.
Like you, I'm pretty sure GoDaddy is the one doing the parking. I do my domain searches with "whois" from the command line. As for whether thei
Getting a Dropped Name- (Score:4, Informative)
But I had also read the story (posted in a reply below somewhere) about how the whole business of getting "dropped" domains worked.
Basically if the Registrar "drops" the domain from it's system, whoever happens to be there at the precise moment it "drops" can snag it.
It's like being part of a hungry mob in a street and someone is throwing a piece of candy off a 10-story building.
Your chances of getting it increase if you have Longer Arms, are Taller and have also brought as many other people acting on your behalf along as well to try to "catch" it.
I ended up registering with several "Drop Catchers" and when the domain I wanted did drop...GoDaddy was NOT one of the "winners"
however- one of the "Drop Catchers" I had registered with DID get it.
however- more that one entity had registered for that domain with that "Drop Catcher" so it promptly went off to an auction.
I dropped out when it went over $800, the name went to one of these guys in the Cayman Islands and will now and forever be one of those crappy place-holder on-page domains that you might happen upon if you clicked an old link to the website that used to be there.
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I had a domain name I used for my website, but I let it lapse. My domain registrar was the one who started parking it, and put up the usual generic portal/search engine. And, in the upper right hand corner of the site was an url that said "Buy this domain!" I clicked on the link, and the asking price for the domain had gone from $15 to $1000.
That's right, one grand. Uh-huh. I think not. Fortunately it's just a personal website, not something I ru
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I have first hand experience with this. (I just got cl1p.com back).
GoDaddy.com backorder does not work, and never will. This article here [mikeindustries.com] explains
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I remember when this hit Digg awhile back. What I understand is happening is that the request for the availability of a domain goes to all the d
there are better domain grabbers than GoDaddy (Score:2)
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Re:One can only hope. (Score:4, Interesting)
a) parked domains with advertisements/portals are detectable
b) list of these sites could be easily kept up to date
c) something that I haven't though of could be used to quickly determine if a domain was parked
Then it would be a trivial plugin to rewrite common typos, and avoid these sites entirely. We can push the advertising somewhere else!
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yeah, subsidize the plug-in development and maitenence with advertising. Pop an interim page that says "You entered , we changed it to , but while we redirect you, why not check out these sites that sell "exmples".
I'm kidding, of course.
OpenDNS (Score:2)
http://www.opendns.com/what/smarter.php [opendns.com]
http://www.opendns.com/what/safer.php [opendns.com]
No difference in typosquatting results, but instead of getting a "not found" error you'll get an ad page if it's a typo they can't resolve.
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"Web 2.0 Sprinkle"?! (Score:5, Funny)
I've now found a great metaphor for all this "Web 2.0" nonsense: urine.
Web 2.0 is people pissing on the Internet!
Quite a bold article... (Score:4, Funny)
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The change (Score:5, Funny)
The change is going to be that the Internet is going to finally resemble a Möbius loop, where once you click on one content link and keep clicking, you will eventually wind up back where you started. People will be trapped in infinite loops of marketing and commerce will collapse because no one will actually be able to buy anything, because they can't break out of the loop.
Re:The change (Score:5, Funny)
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gah (Score:2)
www.BqLJJNJq6vL.com (Score:5, Funny)
www.XFmq1yw1pC3.com
www.QtEQpK1jGnm.com
www.BqLJJNJq6vL.com
www.bbyja3OWEVW.com
www.iQ7aE0YSTl8.com
www.tV56pze3idd.com
and i've got all the
Re:www.BqLJJNJq6vL.com (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, how did you find out my password?
Use parked domains for password validation (Score:2)
Strange but true: With Windows server account validation you need a CAL per account, so parent's alleged approach of matching a registered domain could save money. This system could replace certificates too.
Microsoft Windows 2000 Server 20 User CALs Only $189 to $650 [nextag.com]
Register domain name as low as $3.95/year [active-domain.com]
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Re:www.BqLJJNJq6vL.com (Score:5, Funny)
Re:www.BqLJJNJq6vL.com (Score:5, Funny)
Yours faithfully,
Mr. QtEQpK1jGnm
If it's real, then it's temporary (Score:5, Insightful)
If that truly is the economics of the situation, then it is necessarily temporary. The market always adjusts when the opportunity arises to carry off so much wealth for so little actual effort.
Perhaps the adjustment will come in the form of higher DNS fees, since the 'business' in question is so heavily relying on DNS services.
Perhaps the adjustment will come in the form of higher domain-name registration fees, once the authorities fully grasp the nature of the free-riding involved.
Perhaps the profit per wayward surfer will drop as the sponsoring sites gradually pay less and less per click.
Or if this is truly a market failure, then watch for new legislation. (Not that past legislation bothered to wait for a justifying market failure to arise; indeed, the legislature is always willing, and a market failure is just what it needs to explain actions it wanted to take anyway.)
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But if the parked or typo squatted domain actually leads me to information that is relative to my "search", then I win too.
The market dynamics made this happen and it is unlikely to change until all the possible domains are parke
There is no market economics in this (Score:5, Insightful)
The one idea I've thought of which could prevent this is to make it progressively more expensive to own more domain names. e.g. The first 10 domain names are $10/yr each. Domain names 11-50 are $100/yr each. Domains 50-100 are $1,000/yr each. And so on. There really is no need for any one person to own more than a dozen or two dozen domain names, at least without good financial incentive. True you could set up a sprawling network of shell corporations and paid underlings, but the paperwork necessary to maintain them would quickly become overwhelming without incurring additional costs.
Another idea (Score:2)
Of course, the registrars make money from the squatting, so they'd never do it.
Not such a bad business.. (Score:5, Interesting)
At my company, we have a couple of hundred domain names that we don't currently use. We're not cyber-squatting, we are going to use them at some point in the future - but development time is always in short supply.
In any event, without even trying to sell them, we occasionally have people offer us money for a domain that we have. Sometimes it's a few hundred bucks, sometimes it's more. Just this week we agreed to sell one for $6500. If we were to make a full-time business out of it, I'm sure we could make a good bit of money.
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stupid headline, stupid article (Score:5, Insightful)
Article body: "unrelated information"
Article comes free with idiotic terms like "domainers" (not a word) when what they mean is "squatter".
It's just a euphemism. Anybody with a brain will see right though it. It's no better than calling URL spammers "search engine optimizers".
Re:stupid headline, stupid article (Score:5, Interesting)
This is more like real estate speculation. Buying a parcel of land, and then sitting on it to assert ownership rights, while not developing it and waiting along for someone who wants to buy it from you so that they can use it. Speculating is a lot less unsavory-sounding than squatting.
Translation (Score:3, Informative)
Cutting through the "let's promote lame advertising models" rah-rah, it looks like the idea here is to assume people typing a random keyword into their address bar are searching for a forum and/or wiki on a topic. So these folks want to create some sort of ur-forum (that is, they want to reinvent a modern usenet) and figure buying up a bunch of idle domain names to advertise it is a good starting point.
This would pretty much be the "death of domain parking" at least in the form of a sell-off-the-assets exit strategy. I have no idea why they would buy any domain that wasn't an obvious word or term, though, so if you're holding on to that hot "ilemonstore2003.cx" property you're probably out of luck.
It keeps getting worse, too. (Score:5, Interesting)
These days, however, results from a broad search usually return five or six pages of aggregators, domain parkers, and other foolishness. It's gotten to the point where I feel like if I don't have four or five search terms, it's not worth the effort of paging through the first six screens of useless results to get sort out the wheat from the chaf.
For the moment, with most web advertising operating on a pay-per-view or pay-per-click basis, people creating aggregators and parking domains are making money. I'm hopeful that as advertisers become more interested in tying views or clicks to actual sales, the incentive for putting this kind of useless fluff on the net will decrease. Of course, we'll still have not-so-net-savvy surfers who might click links on a parked page and then buy something. But if the intermediate pages led to useful information, they wouldn't be so annoying, would they?
Eventually, my bet is that there won't be enough profit in advertising to make domain parking worthwhile. May that day come soon.
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What's In a Name? (Score:2)
The real solution is to move from misleadingly narrow UR L s, locators of the precise info resource, to the UR N s, names like "Nabisco" means "biscuits" in the real world. Trademark means competing suppliers of the same pr
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This isn't a solution. Whilest a URN uniquely identifies a resource, it doesn't tell you where to _find_ that resource, so it is pretty useless for a system like the world wide web.
For example, you can form a URN out of a book's ISBN number, but that doesn't tell you where to find information about that book (e.g. the publisher's website) - it only tells you which book to look for once you have
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The ISBN is used with infosystems like bookseller or libarary databases to return the equivalents of URLs to find instances of the book, among other info about the class of copies of that book.
A UR
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Google does evil (Score:5, Insightful)
We have hundreds of thousands of domain names that could effectively and efficiently be used by real organizations as the most direct and obvious addresses to connect with them, but are instead being subsidized by Google to effectively obfuscate the Net. This means that if you really want to find a firm's or organization's site, you increasingly have to use Google to find the domain name they've settled for, since the obvious ones are taken up by these Google-subsidized squatters.
Google does evil here, and for their own ends. It would be simple for them to set standards as to where their ad links can be placed, and put this whole lecherous horde out of business, freeing up the domain name system to work according to its original design. What are the odds Google'll ever even consider this? Slim to none, because Google does evil. They're stinking rich, but they just want more, by any means, even when those means degrade the quality of much of the Web.
BS (Score:5, Insightful)
It's just people making money by thinking ahead.
No, I am not one of these people, but wish I had gotten in when I thought to do it in the 90s. I could use 20million a year with less then 3 million in expenses.
damn.
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A lot of those parked domains, though, are the equivalent of thinking "McDonalds will want to put a franchise here.", buying the land and putting up a "McRonalds" building with a pair of yellow arches suspiciously reminiscent of the ones used by aforementioned burger chain in the hopes that people looking for McDonalds will fail to notice the slight difference in spelling and show up at your place instead.
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real-estate speculators are NOT businessmen (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you're a real-estate speculator not a business man. Businessmen create and run businesses, generate employment for others, service their customers and stimulate the economy. Real-estate speculators, currency traders, domain squatters, ticket scalpers and people who sell PS3s on eBay are just ignorant jerks who are gaming the system to enrich themselves while providing no useful service.
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Domain squatters are not in the same league. They do not add much liquidity to the market, because their investment is so low that it is
Re:BS (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead, what Google has enabled is to turn this wasteland into a money-making opportunity for these folks. Take away the ability to put ads in this space and it will dry up overnight.
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Nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Google does evil (Score:4, Insightful)
one filter to rule them all (Score:3, Interesting)
No, really, I do. The consolidation of the domain squatting market makes it possible to do interesting stuff like NEVER go to their sites - eg a firefox plugin to check who's behind 'direct navigation' site names and, if its a squatter, take me to google instead. (I love how they say direct navigation like its something that users just started doing, that they might patent)
Exactly. (Score:4, Funny)
That'd be a neat extension to have.
domain parking should be banned (Score:2, Insightful)
The essence of the article. (Score:3, Interesting)
What he fails to see, of course, is that the profitability of domain parking was never in the "quality" of the appearence of the parked domain, but it was gotten by virtue of being the first people to snap up the most domains.
As mentioned in the article, most "domain parking companies" aren't grown, they're bought from companies that own domains already and then slowly added to by using automated tools to snatch up new good domains.
How is this article
You (and me) are paying for this via ICANN (Score:5, Interesting)
This is because the "domainers" get free domain name registration tryouts while the rest of us are forced to pay a ICANN-fiat "registry fee" of about $7 per name per year.
The ratio of our full-time registrations to these freeebies is about 1:200. In other words, each of our paid domains is paying the costs for 200 of these "domainers".
ICANN allows this, but it never really was presented to the board of directors for approval (I know, I was on the board at the time). ICANN should stop it and make the registry-fee match the actual costs that Verisign and PIR and others incurr to handle the back-room registry function - a fee that, rather than ICANN's $7 probably ought to be about $0.02 per year - a savings for you and me of more than $300,000,000 per year, every year.
VC money is changing the parking business (Score:3, Interesting)
But soon Google and Yahoo, who provide most of the ads on parked sites, found that click-throughs from parked pages often didn't lead to sales, and many advertisers didn't want to buy AdWords and then have them show up on these sites with no content. Some of the largest parking services began switching to a pay-per-action business model [netcraft.com], instead of pay-per-click.
Meanwhile, venture capital firms started pumping money into the sector, buying up registrars (like Demand Media's deals for eNom and BulkRegister [domainworks.biz]) and large domain portfolios. Vector Capital bought Register.com, and Perot has a piece of Internet REIT. The VCs and Wall Street investors prefer to monetize their domains with developed web sites instead of parked pages. Many of them are using free user generated content to populate these sites with articles and forums linked to their target keywords. Google likes these sites better, and they appear to get more relevant traffic and click-throughs.
But there will always be plenty of smaller operators with thousands of single-page ad-filled parked domains. The low price of domains means there's virtually no barrier for entry into this business, and that's not likely to change anytime soon.
Taking advantage of users (Score:3, Interesting)
In consideration of having your work posted on the Site for any period of time, You grant eHow a perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, transmit, distribute, publicly perform and display, and create derivative works of the Content, in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, to make, have made, import, and sell the Content, and to sublicense all of the foregoing rights (including the right to grant further such sublicenses)."
So he sees social networking not as a way to give users voices or a place to share ideas, but as a way to monetize them and to get users to generate free content. People aren't going to use a site that treats its users like free content machines and not people, especially not when there are sites like Blogger and Livejournal that give users control over their content and don't post ads. Even the ad-filled Facebook always makes sure to keep users informed, respond to feedback, and keep the ads to a reasonable level. If you don't respect your users, they'll quickly find someplace else to go.
Also, why in the world do we need another social networking site? There have been tons of competitors to MySpace and Facebook, and none of them have really caught on. Remember that this guy didn't develop MySpace; he just found a way to make lots of money by selling it.
The arrogance of this guy's plan to get users to do the work for him while he makes bundles of money is astounding, and I don't think that people will stand for it.
Re:Domains (Score:5, Funny)
PenIsland.net [penisland.net] is what you were thinking of.
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DNS could easily become a directory (Score:2)
Imagine:
IBM.IT.services.com
localbloke.gardening.services.co.uk
penisland.sex.services.com
Technically it's trivial to do. DNS was designed specifically for this sort of purpose. The problem is with the people who manage the domains, they're basically incompetent and exactly the same would be true of any whizzy new directory service which was created.
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Also you wouldn't be able to add a new category under 'services' without ICANN approval (because it might 'destabilise' the internet) so we'd be left with 5 or 6 (sex, gardening, computing and probably a special one for museum with one domain in it).
So more of the same then.
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