Welcome to the land of Misfit Profiles – a place where profiles for social media sites go to languish when somebody uses their work email as their only profile email address, and then leave that employer, never to regain that profile again!

The other day I was browsing my LinkedIn connections and found some odd profiles. There were some people who had 2 profiles – one only complete to a certain point, and another complete up to now. When I looked at one colleague’s incomplete profile, it had an email address on it from his previous employer. Where there is a way of combining 2 LinkedIn accounts my guess is for most people they just abandon the old account and start anew. When I looked at the more current profile for my colleague, it had the email address of his current employer.

Most social media sites use email addresses to authenticate a person. If you use a work address – or any email address that you give up at some point – you may lose access to your account. This is why I continue to advocate using your own domain name for your personal email. I take this a step forward by advocating using your own email address with your own domain name for social media sites. If you change jobs or Internet providers, you don’t have to go through hoops to regain your account. That is, if the social media site even has hoops for you to go through.

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Domain Names • Technology • (3) Comments • Permalink

Next Tuesday, July 14, I will be the guest speaker in the chat room during the live domain name auction on Bido. Bido is a unique “social auction platform” which offers for auction one domain name a day exclusively on the Web. You don’t have to bid on a domain name to participate in the live chat, but you do need to register.

The domain name to be auctioned is unlock.info. The term "unlock" has a high degree of meaning in the world of mobile devices, as a device is either locked to a particular provider or unlocked and can be used on any provider. I have written on locked vs. unlocked mobile devices before and I only own and use those unlocked.

I am looking forward to joining the conversation on domain names, mobile technology and Internet services during the chat on Bido. If you have never participated in a domain name auction I encourage you to check it out.

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Announcements • Domain Names • Mobile Technology • (5) Comments • Permalink

There is momentum around New York City getting its own generic top-level domain (gTLD) - .nyc. The team organizing it, dotNYC LLC even has a ringing endorsement by former mayor Ed Koch. Where there has been a lot of controversy about the mass unveiling of gTLDs, this one has a lot of traction and makes a lot of sense to me, especially for a city of 8 million plus people.

So this got me thinking – which would be a more valuable domain name, pizza.com or pizza.nyc?

Last year pizza.com was sold in auction, and the price was reported to be around the US$2.6Million it sold for earlier. There is a Web site at pizza.com that has the tagline of “everything about pizza” but isn’t a compelling Web site, especially to someone like myself who 1) designs and develops Web site, 2) is 100% Italian American and 3) has eaten quite a bit of pizza in his time! I am not quite sure of the revenue model here; I can perform what is a Google search through the site for pizzerias, but you can’t order a pizza directly through the Web site.

When I think of pizza.nyc, all I think of is opportunity. The competition for this domain name will be significant, with parties from within New York City and beyond. The name recognition will almost be automatic in the City as there will be other .nyc domain names plastered throughout the city and people will start to naturally go to whatever dot nyc to get to a product or service. Then there is revenue. Pizza.com could be one pizza chain or a consortium of many. Whether it is direct or affiliate sales, there is definitely opportunity to make money from pizza in a city where people are passionate about their pizza.

This is not to say there is not opportunity for pizza.com. I do not have any insight or knowledge into its owners or their business model. What I am saying is based on what I see – both from what pizza.com is and what pizza.nyc can be.

What do you think? Are you in the pizza business? Are you a resident of New York City? Or do you just buy pizza? We’d like to know.

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Business • Domain Names • Technology • (5) Comments • Permalink

The International Olympics Committee is now touring the candidate cities for the 2016 Summer Olympics, and their first stop was Chicago a few weeks ago. Everywhere you looked throughout the Windy City, there were signs promoting the games coming here in 7 years. There were also a few signs against it, but that’s a topic for another time.

The signage was branded with the Chicago 2016 logo and imagery, as shown in the accompanying picture, which is at the corner of State and Madison Streets. It also features the recently changed tag line, “Let Friendship Shine,” which replaced the former one, “Stir The Soul.” Apparently the old tag line did not translate well into other languages. As someone who thinks about domain names as much as I do, I wondered if the Chicago Olympics Committee registered the domain names for the new tag line. From the looks of the registration data and registered domain names, it is not 100% clear if they did or not.

Searches of the WHOIS database using DomainTools show registrations for letfriendshipshine.com, .net, .org and .us. There was no registration for the other “primary” TLDs of .biz and .info. I did not extend the search beyond these TLDs. Looking at the registrants of these domain names, the .com and .org have private registration on them, which is a service to mask the true owner of the domain name. The .net is registered to a company in Chicago, and the .us is registered to an individual in Chicago. All 4 domain names point to parked pages which display advertising.

I then looked up the registration of the main Chicago Olympics Committee domain name, chicago2016.org, and its registrant was also masked by private registration, and the same one as letfriendshipshine.com and .org. It can be inferred these 2 domain names are owned by the Committee. I did not contact them to ask. As for the others, it can be inferred they are not.

Part of the reason for being inquisitive surrounds the registration of chicago2016.com, which was registered prior to the .org by an individual in Chicago. It is tied to a Web site offering a fair and balanced economic discussion about the Olympics coming to Chicago. The Chicago Olympics Committee filed a case to win back the name, but lost. Perhaps they did their diligence this time and got the domain names before the new tag line was announced.

If they do own the domain names, 2 questions come to mind. Why not register all available TLDs? In the grand scheme of things, domain names are cheap! Also, why not use them? A quick Google search found zero results for the official Chicago Olympics Web site for “let friendship shine.” Where getting the name to protect the brand is smart, actually using it can return great results in your investment.

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Business • Domain Names • (1) Comments • Permalink

There’s no shortage of information or advice on the use of Twitter. Allow me to add something I have not seen elsewhere – make sure the URL for your Web site in your Twitter profile has your own domain name in it.

When people customize their profile and backgrounds in Twitter, they can add a link under “more info URL” to any Web site, blog, service, etc. Some also suggest you link to a unique Twitter landing page. Whatever you link to is your choice, and this is not something I am choosing to discuss here. My recommendation is the actual URL be to a domain name you own – not to another service, but to a domain name registered by you. For my own Twitter profile, it points to my blog, The Hot Iron.

Why own your own domain name? I have talked about this at length before and the beauty of it is you can use that domain name in any number of ways. It can redirect to another URL, such as your Twitter page or LinkedIn profile. You can also customize your hosted blog at WordPress to use your own domain name. You can also customize Gmail to use it instead of gmail.com. Even more beautiful is the fact that you can switch Web hosts, blog services or even email to another provider all while keeping your same URL and email address! If you have ever moved and did not have postal mail forwarded, think of it as a permanent address.

Your own domain name further brands you. What you choose for a domain name is up to you and is a topic for another time. Just as long as you have the domain name itself, people will be able to identify and reach you with ease.

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Domain Names • (2) Comments • Permalink