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Owners of domain names seized by ICE, using Twitter to communicate with users

Domain names seized by ICE - Homeland Security investigations

TechCrunch is reporting that many of the owners of the domain names seized by Homeland Security earlier this week because of copyright infringement are now moving their web sites to alternate domain names. 

And the owners are using Twitter to get the word out about the “move”.

Some have already started to migrate to other domains, though it’s likely choices like .net won’t be any safer. Torrent-Finder owner Waleed Gad El Kareem said he switched his site over to Torrent-Finder.info the moment he saw the ICE message on Torrent-Finder.com, posting the new site’s address on Twitter.

As TechCrunch points out, some web sites have switched from .com to .net, as well as .com to .info.   Jamie Zoch, of DotWeekly, has a full rundown of all the domain names seized.

RapGodfathers.info, one of the sites that had its .com seized, registered the .info on Nov. 25th (see Whois Record below).  The .net and .org were already registered.

rapgodfathers.info whois record

Read more about Sites With Government Seized Domains Are Moving On, On Twitter.

What do you think? Should the owners have gone with .info, a different extension, a .com with hyphens, or something entirely different?

 

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News Trademarks

Recent sales of Facebook, iPhone, and Twitter domain names

twitter facebook

Since its launch Flippa has been a goldmine for domain and web site owners who quickly flip for cash. 

Although there are a large number of people selling legit properties, there are others who sell questionable sites and domain names.  And while not every listing is necessarily a violation, either way, the demand continues to grow on the Flippa marketplace for all things Google, Apple and of course social networking: particularly Twitter and Facebook.

While most might call it risky behavior to flirt with trademark violations, the latest sales data over at Flippa indicates not much is going to change anytime soon.

Deals are getting done despite potential problems down the road for new owners. 

In case you’re wondering what’s been selling, here’s a look at some of the recent sales of Facebook, iPhone and Twitter domain names/web sites sold through Flippa. 

Facebookfanstore.com sold for $1,400 today
Twitterfollowerswidget.com sold for $41 yesterday
Trafficfacebook.com sold for $610 yesterday
iPhoneinsanity.com sold for $350 yesterday
Topfacebookmarketing.com sold for $225 on Nov. 19
Facebookfansnow.com sold for $1,010 on Nov. 19
Twittermarketingblog.org sold for $77 on Nov. 18
Twitterfollowerservice.com sold for $100 on Nov. 17

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News

Twitter domain names and websites see strong sales on Flippa

increase my followers

Flippa, a marketplace for selling websites and domain names, is helping owners of Twitter-related domain names and websites see strong sales.  Flippa sellers have access to a huge crowd of buyers.  In October 2010, traffic to Flippa was nearly 250,000 unique visitors according to Compete

For sellers looking to be quickly rewarded for registering a Twitter domain or established web site, the figures are strong – especially compared to other recently ended sales reported by Flippa.

The sales today include:

Thetweetmaster.com won for $80
Twitterfollowersnow.net won for $100
Increasemyfollowers.com won for $1,750
Twitterfollowing.info won for $100

In March 2010, Flippa was credited with selling Retweet.com at public auction for $250,000 – it’s biggest sale since the site launched in 2009.  The company even published a case study about the sale entitled:  How Retweet.com was built then sold for $250K.

Tell us about the Retweet website sale.
We’ve only sold Retweet.com through Flippa. We originally planned to sell the website through a private broker, but later decided a competitive public auction was our best route for this domain.

We acquired (purchased) the domain during the explosion in the popularity of the Twitter.com platform.

Mesiab Labs had been building marketing software for Twitter for nearly 6 months when we saw the growing market demand for real time news and how Twitter was an essential tool in making this possible ( Hudson plane crash ).  Now since news spreads through Twitter by users retweet’ing stories, we figured retweet.com was the most appropriate name for such a service.

After the domain name was acquired we spent the next couple of months building it up as a side project. We worked with crowd-sourced designers (ed: 99designs.com ) and a few highly-skilled outsourced programmers to help complete the project while we focused on our ( Mesiab Labs ) bottom line.

The website began to grow organically after online blogs and other press announced the release of Retweet.com, the popular name created much buzz around the web ( positive and negative ).

What inspired you to sell Retweet?
The website eventually got to a point where we realized it obviously shouldn’t be a side project ( rather someone’s main focus ).  Since our expertise is in marketing software platforms, we felt that we had taken retweet.com as far as we could. This combined with our new focus on our latest startup company Jounce, Inc., we decided to sell.

The full case study can be read online at Flippa.

You can expect the Twitter sales to continue as Twitter continues to grow in numbers.

A few Twitter facts (updated September 14, 2010 on Twitter’s web site)
Twitter has 175 million registered users.
95M tweets are written per day.

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News

Twiter.com shows the power of Typos with +132% Yearly Change in Traffic

twiter

Are there problems with typo domains?  With many, yes, especially if they were registered in bad faith. But “typo” doesn’t always equal bad faith.  And Twiter.com is an example of one such domain name. 

At least, in its beginnings. 

The typo domain which has been written about many times in the past, received over 79,000 unique visitors in February 2010.  At times over the past year, Twiter.com hit over 100,000 unique visitors per month according to Compete.  And as the massively popular microblogging service Twitter.com has soared in traffic, so too has traffic to Twiter.com.  In February 2009, the domain had less than 35,000 unique visitors per month.

Despite the typo-believers who argue every domain name similar to a trademark or service, is registered in bad faith, Twiter.com was registered long before Twitter.com became what it is today.

No one knows with certainty if Twitter.com will ever try going after the current owner of Twiter.com.  But unfortunately, the assumption of many people landing on the Twiter.com page resulting from a typo, is that a typo-squatter must be behind the initial registration.

Whatever happens with the domain, you gotta be impressed by the power of typo traffic. Twiter.com has an Alexa Traffic Rank of 27,136, more popular than some of the biggest sites on the net.

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News

Twitter domain news: TweetLater.com changing its name to SocialOomph.com

tweetlater

TweetLater, the popular third-party application Twitter tool which gets over 200,000 visitors per month, has decided to rebrand themselves by changing their domain name. 

Although Twitter encourages the use of the word ‘Tweet’ (as long as their users are protected), TweetLater has decided to go with SocialOomph [a name much harder to type in by far, especially with the letter ‘o’].

Here’s what TweetLater had to say about the name change:

From Monday, August 31st, 2009, TweetLater.com will be no more and will be known as SocialOomph.com.

The transition to the new name takes place over the weekend of August 29th and 30th.

Why The Change?

To date we have been focusing on providing productivity solutions for Twitter users. We decided to change our name to allow for future expansion into other social media solutions, and to ensure that our brand does not conflict with any current or future legal rights of the Twitter organization.

To allay any speculation, we want to make clear that this is an unsolicited, proactive and preemptive action on our side.