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.