How Wedgies.com Sidestepped a Domain Squatting Felon to buy their dotcom

[richardv]

Isn't the title misleading?

- The guy wasn't domain squatting at all.

- They weren't Wedgies.com (they were Wedgi.es)

- They didn't sidestep him at all. They negotiated fairly.

If you like domain stories, check out Klouts.. (Which I actually prefered to this story). I kind of felt mislead after reading this artciel (albeit it was an enjoyable story).

http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/29/how-klout-got-klout-com/

[drharris]

The title is also misleading because it claims they "sidestepped" the owner. They did not sidestep the owner at all; they tracked him down and paid for the domain.Sidestepping would have been filing a complaint with ICANN about the lack of proper contact information. Which would have been cheaper and possibly quite effective.

[mistercow]

>In a final twist, the rental fee on his ankle tracking bracelet was up, and he needed money in a hurry to avoid being sent back to jail — hence the frantic request for $500. This was getting weirder and weirder.

So let me get this straight: the government requires ankle tracking bracelets for parolees, outsources these bracelets to the private sector, and then requires the parolees themselves to pay the rental fees out of pocket. And since the parolees themselves have virtually no bargaining power, this is a privatization scenario where market forces are almost entirely absent.

Just brilliant.

[porterhaney]

Their only chance is to hope they bought a single word domain in 1995 and hope they can sell it off to pay for their ankle bracelet.

[cjensen]

The guy is going back to jail unless he gets $500. At that point they should have offered $500 for the domain name.

[nowarninglabel]

Yes, quite true, this is all before trial too, at least was the case with a friend.

[talmand]

Is anyone else disturbed by the idea that the host provider offered to "turn off the DNS to the site" for some person just because they contacted him? Then passed along the domain owner's personal info to that person? Hopefully they asked for permission before handing out personal info. But how did they explain the outage to their customer?

"Oh, we shut you down because somebody we don't know wants to talk to you. Do you mind if we give him your current email address? By the way, what is your current email address?"

Seems it might be of service to several people to know who this provider is.

[hnwh]

unless they transfered it elsewhere, looks like Godaddy..

getting someone else's domain shut down though is unbelievably fuk'd up.. this alone turns me off of the site

   Registered through: GoDaddy.com, LLC (http://www.godaddy.com)
   Domain Name: WEDGIES.COM
      Created on: 19-Feb-99
      Expires on: 19-Feb-14
      Last Updated on: 04-May-12

[jawns]

“We’ve already found that people who don’t know each other ask the same questions,” says Jacobson. “Tupac vs Biggie, East Coast vs. West Coast… What’s more interesting though, are the answers to the question, ‘Of people who prefer Tupac, do they prefer skiing or snowboarding?’ These are the nuggets that marketers dream of.”

That's basically what http://www.correlated.org does.

But I don't think they'll find that marketers are clamoring for this type of data. And I think Correlated does a good job of showing why.

[mwexler]

Hunch also did something like this... and sold for a pretty good amount. So perhaps, depending on how it's implemented, it may meet some folks' needs.

[theyCallMeSwift]

Correlated.org limits you to the questions they ask every day. Wedgies is empowering it's users to ask whatever they want. Think about how many more data points that is.

[joshstrange]

Between "Unfortunately, the domain was harder to come by than a tequila shot at an AA meeting" and "This is the digital version of “smoking him out” (like you would a rabbit in a hole, not a pothead in a dorm room)." I couldn't stop laughing.

[theyCallMeSwift]

Online surveys need to be "less boxer and more brief". Wedgies is doing a damn good job of solving that if you ask me.

[ludicast]

Good time meeting these guys on the doer bus. Wedgies has some legs to it.

[lnanek2]

explanation of their service reminds me of thumb: http://thumb.it/

although I guess thumb is targeted at everyone, wedgies more business/marketers

[jjacobson]

Is what we did terrible?

[grecy]

If you got the DNS turned off on one of my domains for no good reason, I'd be more than a little angry - at you and at my host.