Chris Clark had no idea that when he purchased pizza.com he’d find himself such a tasty deal. Sure, he must have thought he’d make a nice little profit but was he aware that he’d have an anonymous bidder pay £1,300,000 for the domain? I think not. Chris had purchased the domain 20 years ago when the internet was in its embryonic stages, paying just £10/year to renew the domain.

If you too think you can snap up a potential goldmine - think again. There’s more than 150,000,000 domains registered worldwide and the number is growing daily.

Beneath are a few domain names that have made a mint:

Business.com
Sold for £4,600,000

Vodka.com
Sold for £1,500,000

Recycle.co.uk
Sold for £150,000 (not a load of rubbish after all)

Fund.com
Sold for £4,800,000

Cruises.co.uk
Sold for £560,000 (record holder for a .co.uk)

Diamond.com
£3,700,000.

Well brace yourself as we may have a huge invoice on our hands, an invoice to the tune of £20,000,000,000 (£20bn). Its becoming apparent that the amount of bandwidth being used is clogging up our copper pipes. If i’m still being a little too technical I’ll tone it down.

In the UK, we have traditionally used underground copper pipes that aid the transfer of internet-data and traffic, otherwise known as bandwidth. Recently, a huge rise in bandwidth from websites such as YouTube and other streaming-media websites means that we are putting an immense amount of pressure on our pipes. The internet is doubling in size every two years. 2007 saw YouTube using the same amount of bandwidth that was used for the entire internet in 2000 - thats a lot of bandwidth.

Bill Thompson of City University said “I think we’re in trouble. If you’ve got kids on YouTube and parents on iPlayer, it all starts to go very slow”. But fear not - help is on the way thanks to recent discoveries that are set to revolutionise the web.

Cern are a nuclear reasearch organisation, they have created servers that are linked by fibre optic cables that work upto 10,000 times faster than the broadband we know. Here’s the part that isn’t quite as cheerful - BT are estimating that to install a national fibre optic network the costs could mount to the £20bn mark. Ouch.

Being avid web-designers, it was only a matter of time before we found out about Facebook’s new profile layouts. I’d first heard about these new facebook profiles a few weeks back but after searching on Facebook’s blog, I eventually found the article myself. Was I wowed? Hmm. Maybe I was expecting too much. They’re not bad.

It has now become apparent that with a multitude of infantile and ever-so-irritating applications facebook’s once-tidy profile pages have now become a mess. Users are forced to trawl through application upon application to get to what they finally want. All I wanted to do was to write on a friends wall - not to buy him a virtual glass of beer, not to let him know what my Celebrity name is and certainly not to tell him that “I’m interested” in him.

With that said, I do admire Facebook’s constant awareness of usability. They’ve seen what’s happening and have decided to tidy up facebook profiles once and for all. What a nice bunch of people they are.

As you can see the profiles are a lot less cluttered. Facebook look to be restoring a key aspect of their website that was pivotal in gaining one of the fastest growing online communities in the world - usability.

For more information, checkout Facebook’s blog here.

Great to see that freedom of thought and speech is still alive and well in the UK’s Civil Service…
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3522316.ece

About a month ago I was reading my Sitepoint Tribune newsletter and was alarmed to read that the domain registrar Network Solutions was in the practice of “reserving” domains that were searched for on their site, effectively locking the searcher into purchasing from them at their higher-than-average prices. This dubious practice is known as “tasting”.

It works like this: you happen to search for a domain at NS, it’s reported as available, then you try to register at your preferred registrar who is cheaper, and it is now unavailble, only minutes after your original search. However, you’ll find that it IS still available at Network Solutions. Ka-ching!

NS used to justify this by saying they’re “protecting” you from people who would buy the domain merely to stop you from having it. (Pardon?) However, the domain is available to anyone who wants to buy it at Network Solutions, not just you, the original searcher. Sounds like PR of the horse-has-bolted variety to me.

If all that wasn’t bad enough it appears that this search data can be bought by third parties who will then buy up domains that may be of worth - a practice called “front-running” - and who will probably charge you an even greater price for it.

So I sat there feeling lucky that I’d never searched at their site, at the same time wondering whether there would actually be much likelihood of my doing so since they’re based in the US. I don’t know about you but if anything goes wrong with one of my domains I don’t want to be making transatlantic phone calls to sort it out. (No - I’d rather use my Euro-conglomerate registrar with a call centre in the Asteroid Belt.) Apparently though, at one time they were the only domain registrar in existence so they may still be a natural choice for many people.

Anyway, by a horrible quirk of fate, a few days later we had a call from a client of ours saying that she’d searched for a domain with, yes, Network Solutions, and they’d bagged her domain and wanted their inflated price for it. In the end she had no choice but to do business with them.

Many people who’ve heard about NS’s antics have been having fun with this by searching at the site for domains named “NetworkSolutions[append insult here]” and noting with glee the speed with which they’re created. And understandably so. As you can tell by now, the whole affair is rather convoluted but I understand that the upshot of it is that NS have rectfied their ahem, business model, so that the domain you are interested in is only reserved at NS much later in the checkout process if you so wish.

As complicated as all that is, I think I’ll just stick with the registrar I’ve always used - I just can’t cope with all the intrigue.