That is, why is this an issue that's any more important than that Chinese ISP that keeps sending you emails about the .cn version of your domain name? Having yourname.blogspot.com wasn't a priority yesterday, so why is it in any way bad news to find that it's not available today?
There are a million places to register unique names for things. Some (like .com domains) have value, some (like Geocities profiles, square feet of peat at the Lagavulin distillery, and .blogspot.com subdomains) do not.
Every time I see Blogger.com I'm always shocked that the site still looks exactly like it did years ago -- it's had even has less TLC than Yahoo! has given Flickr. It really speaks volumes about a lack of focus at Google -- in the time Blogger has atrophied we've seen the likes of Movable Type, Wordpress and Tumblr arrive on the scene -- so that's at least three generations of blog that blogger.com is behind at current count. Honestly someone squatting on a blogger namespace seems almost as silly as setting up a myspace page at this point...
And they've made lots of improvements all over the site over the years. Flickr is one of the remaining products at Yahoo! that's gotten any serious love lately.
From someone that has been using them the past five years on a regular basis they do keep adding features and polishing old ones and I keep returning because of that fact.
They used to be the best game in town because they had a simple tool to spit out a HTML-only version of your blog and FTP it wherever you wanted. The result was a blog that you could host on a cheap VPS and have it actually stand up to five people hitting it at once (unlike everybody's self-hosted Wordpress setup).
It was a really cool feature, and a giant pain point when it went away because there still to this day is not a replacement for it. If you want to static-host your blog in 2011, you need to write code.
You guys gotta know that even though Yahoo is kind of an old player here in Europe/US, Yahoo Japan is by far the most visited site in Japan and the most widely used search engine with a market of around 70%. Nonetheless Yahoo (the actual one) only owns around 35% of the shares so that Softbank with the rest of them actually runs it.
The guys are doing it pretty nicely with yahoo mail, the site and flickr, it is a shame that their time has gone by.
Selling accounts like he was seems to be in violation of the blogger terms of use, relevant section:
"7. No Resale of the Service. Unless expressly authorized in writing by Google, you agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, trade, resell or exploit for any commercial purposes (a) any portion of the Service, (b) use of the Service, or (c) access to the Service."
Although I didn't see any way to report the violation.
I'm thinking about proposing to buy it for an amount covering his cost except a dollar. He will still lose money (which should serve as a valuable lesson), but not as much as if I never buy it - and I really don't need it anyway...
I just realized—it's probably a great investment to buy common misspellings of your own company's name. They can bring more traffic to your site (and keep you from having to pay name sharks.) If your company decides they don't need them, you can probably flip them for a big profit.
[+] [-] jasonkester|14 years ago|reply
That is, why is this an issue that's any more important than that Chinese ISP that keeps sending you emails about the .cn version of your domain name? Having yourname.blogspot.com wasn't a priority yesterday, so why is it in any way bad news to find that it's not available today?
There are a million places to register unique names for things. Some (like .com domains) have value, some (like Geocities profiles, square feet of peat at the Lagavulin distillery, and .blogspot.com subdomains) do not.
[+] [-] saalweachter|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelpinto|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timdorr|14 years ago|reply
And they've made lots of improvements all over the site over the years. Flickr is one of the remaining products at Yahoo! that's gotten any serious love lately.
[+] [-] icefox|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abraham|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonkester|14 years ago|reply
They used to be the best game in town because they had a simple tool to spit out a HTML-only version of your blog and FTP it wherever you wanted. The result was a blog that you could host on a cheap VPS and have it actually stand up to five people hitting it at once (unlike everybody's self-hosted Wordpress setup).
It was a really cool feature, and a giant pain point when it went away because there still to this day is not a replacement for it. If you want to static-host your blog in 2011, you need to write code.
[+] [-] eLobato|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sidwyn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] personalcompute|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gorloth|14 years ago|reply
Although I didn't see any way to report the violation.
[+] [-] elbrodeur|14 years ago|reply
Opportunists don't bother me, but this is pretty tacky.
[+] [-] jstreebin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] troethom|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] vaksel|14 years ago|reply
For example a few weeks ago airnb.com sold for 5 grand on GoDaddy.
[+] [-] avree|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjy04|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsergean|14 years ago|reply
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