Twitter is the new owner of the domain name re-tweet.com.
The popular social networking company took ownership of the domain from David Quinlan on June 13, 2011.
Domain Name………. re-tweet.com
Creation Date…….. 2009-02-07
Registration Date…. 2011-06-11
Expiry Date………. 2013-02-07
Organisation Name…. Twitter, Inc.
Organisation Address. 795 Folsom Street
Organisation Address. Suite 600
Organisation Address. San Francisco
Organisation Address. 94107
Organisation Address. CA
Organisation Address. UNITED STATES
UPDATED DATE: 2011-06-13
According to Flippa, the name sold at public auction for $150 on March 28, 2011, then on March 29 the registrant information was placed behind GoDaddy WHOIS privacy. On June 3, WHOIS privacy was removed and the name showed David Quinlan as the registrant.
It appears the domain was acquired at Sedo, where the name was parked.
Retweet.com (without the hyphen), once a service that aggregated Twitter stories, sold for $250,000 in 2010, also via Flippa. The web site is now a video monetization platform, and shows no signs of its original platform.
Could this spell more trouble for Tweetmeme?
In 2009, Twitter launched its retweet feature that helps users quickly share tweets with followers. Though the company has a Tweet button, it has yet to launch an official Retweet button to compete with Tweetmeme’s, which is currently displayed across hundreds of thousands of sites.
I’ve reached out to David Quinlan the seller for comment and will update this post if I hear back.
UPDATE: June 14, 2011 05:29 PM EST: Matthew Panzarino, has updated The Next Web story. Looks like Twitter has no plans for the name. “Twitter has responded to this story to let us know that they have no current plans for the future of ‘re-tweet.com’. The owner of the domain offered to give it to Twitter and they now manage it as part of their ‘brand protection strategy’,” wrote Matthew in an update.
Discussion: TechCrunch and The Next Web.