Cybersquatters are famous for registering bulk domains and holding onto them until someone offers them money or other currency for them. In a way, this is like real-estate speculation and if you're not infringing on any trademarks or registered names, go ahead and register as many names as you would like.
However, the point of this blog is not my frustration with Cybersquatters, but rather frustration with myself when I registered two domain names yesterevening through my registrar of choice, GoDaddy.com. I was sitting around the computer with a friend and we thought of some really clever names for a pet project that she was working on. Needless to say, I registered the domains for the project, but didn't realize that I had misspelled one of the domains and when I did a WHOIS lookup this morning to make sure I had successfully registered the domain, it was not registered! I quickly tried to register the correctly spelled domain but the dot com was already taken by someone in Kentucky.
I am/was extremely frustrated with myself not because I lost $8.99 per year in domain registration fees she will not be using, but rather frustrated because it was a silly mistake! The product manager in me wants to write to GoDaddy.com and let them know that they should offer a spell-checking utility on their registration process so this doesn't happen to more people as I'm positive I'm not the first.
Oh well, life goes on.
I think that has happened to us all at least once. Also, I wouldn't doubt that they were the ones who gobbled up the name after the mispelling.
Posted by: Christien | August 09, 2006 at 09:24 AM