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News

Facebook registers ‘newsroom’ domains, is a social news website on the way?

Facebook Newsroom Whois

Facebook has had a busy week with domain names.

On January 18, the company registered a slew of domains with “FB Origin” in the name.  It followed up those purchases with “timeline movie maker” domains

Facebook hasn’t officially been confirmed as the buyer of the timeline domains since the registrant is hidden behind Whois privacy, but the names were registered through the internet brand protection company MarkMonitor and the web addresses re-direct users to the Facebook Timeline page.

Now the social networking giant has bought up “Facebook Newsroom” names like facebook-newsroom.com.

Altogether, the company registered three domains: facebook-newsroom.com (Whois), facebook-newsroom.net (Whois), and facebook-newsroom.org (Whois).

It’s unknown what Facebook will do with its latest domains, but if it has anything to do with the word newsroom, maybe the plan is to launch a social news website where users submit content, similar to Reddit.

In case you’re wondering, facebooknewsroom.com (missing the hyphen) was registered by a resident of Kansas in 2011.

[Update 1 on January 23, 2012 at 3:53pm EST:  Turns out these domain registrations aren’t all that exciting.  I just received an e-mail from The OutCast Agency (one of Facebook’s PR teams) who say, “The domains you reference are part of an upgrade to Facebook’s press room, not part of a new product.”

Discussion: Mediagazer, Fast Company, Journalism.org, 10,000 Words, All Facebook, NBC Bay Area, Marketing LandIndex, @ckanal, Simply Zesty, mediabistro.com, @PRNewswire, @cschweitz, brandchannel.com, and The Southern Ontario/WNY Radio-TV Forum

Categories
News

Social news site Reddit registers an avalanche of nearly 300 reddit domains

reddit

Conde Nast Digital, owners of the social news service Reddit, recently registered nearly 300 domain names. 

The names, all registered on May 31, 2011, include the keyword ‘reddit’ and range from bonusreddit.com to techreddit.com.

Registrant: 
      Conde Nast Digital
      Conde Nast Digital
      Four Times Square 23rd Floor
      New York, NY 10036
Registrar Name….: CORPORATE DOMAINS, INC.
   Registrar Whois…: whois.corporatedomains.com
   Registrar Homepage: www.cscprotectsbrands.com 

      Created on…………..: Tue, May 31, 2011
      Expires on…………..: Fri, May 31, 2013
      Record last updated on..: Tue, May 31, 2011

According to TechCrunch the news site experiences about 75 million monthly visits and is one of the top 100 most visited sites on the Internet — all with very limited programming resources

Earlier this week, Josh Zelman a writer for TechCrunch posted an episode of Founder Stories with host Chris Dixon and Reddit Founder, Alexis Ohanian, who offers insights into the site.

Plans for domain names?

It’s possible the web addresses will make it a lot easier for users to participate in the different discussion areas found on Reddit such as the gaming area (URL: reddit.com/r/gaming/).  The discussion areas generate threads with hundreds of comments.

No news of this has appeared on Reddit’s blog or other technology blogs or news sites, but acquiring nearly 300 domain names is a sizeable investment, particularly if many more are on the way.

You can see a full list of the new domain registrations here.

[UPDATE:  June 1st, 2011 4:12 PM EST:  I just received a Google News Alert for the keyword “domain name” and see that WebProNews just posted a similar story.]