Myspace is up to something.
The social networking site, which is owned by Specific Media and Justin Timberlake, quietly bought up domains with spotly in the name.
Up until recently, the domains spotly.net, spotly.org and spotly.us were registered to MarkMonitor’s privacy service DNStination, Inc.
Now the privacy has been removed, and Peter Wang the Senior Director of Production Operations at MySpace, is listed as the owner of each of the domains, which were first registered in the fall of 2010.
It’s possible at one time, there was a plan for the names. Or perhaps, Myspace has abandoned its plans for Spotly following the sale of the company in 2011.
But what’s interesting, is that it appears the names came up for renewal in October 2011, and all were renewed for three more years until 2014.
As of today, Myspace doesn’t appear to own spotly.com. It’s currently up for sale on the domain marketplace Sedo for nearly $5,000. Spot.ly, which was created in 2009, is owned by a resident of Santa Monica, California, according to WHOIS records.
Spotly.com was an active site in 2011 that provided an app which let users create a digital message in a bottle. The site, which is now defunct, described the product as, “Head to where a message has been left, open Spotly and you’ll be able to open the message in a bottle. Discover the world around you by finding messages with songs, videos and more.”
Myspace is going through a re-design that even has Justin Timberlake involved, so anything is possible.
As of today though, the company has made no announcement regarding Spotly.