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Facebook takes control of FaceSounds dot-com, dot-info domain names

facesounds.com whois

Facebook Inc. has taken control of FaceSounds.com, which at one time offered a free search toolbar add-on to users wanting to change their Facebook chat sounds. 

A quick search on the internet turned up many unhappy users who said FaceSounds spammed their friends.

Previously owned by a resident of Tel Aviv, the Whois information for FaceSounds.com and FaceSounds.info was updated this week and now reflects Facebook, Inc. as the owner of both domains.

It’s unknown how Facebook went about acquiring the names or whether the company has any plans, but at the time of this story, neither domain resolves to a web page. 

My guess is that this is nothing more than Facebook protecting its IP rights.

Discussion: AllFacebook

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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