DomainTools Blog

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch recently spoke at a domain conference in LA. He was talking to a room full of Domainers about his adventures in Web 2.0 land. Mr. Arrington left the domain world a few years ago and started TechCrunch. However, back when he was co-founder and CEO of Pool.com, he firmly lived in the domain world. Mike and I first met at an ICANN meeting about 5 years ago. Little did I know that he would turn out to become a Web 2.0 superstar reporter.

Arrington gave the room a firm lecture about how Silicon Valley does not understand the domain industry. He explained that they view Domainers as evil hoarding monsters that just squat on perfectly good domain names. Arrington said the industry is ripe for change because it is so heavily Web 1.0 based and has numerous ways it could improve if it embraces 2.0 technologies. He remarked that he is a customer of GoDaddy and that when he uses their website he wants to throw his laptop out the window. He called for a Web 2.0 company to step up and handle domain registrations. Mr. Arrington also wondered why it is not possible to see all domains listed for sale in one place. I quickly pointed out DomainTools provides this service in the For Sale section. Yes, we must have a low profile if a former domainer like Arrington does not know about this service. DomainTools gathers domains from all corners of the world such as Afternic, Sedo, GoDaddy, BuyDomains, and Fabulous. Any organization that has over 2,000 names may include those names in the For Sale section on the DomainTools site.

I must admit, DomainTools does not have an RSS feed for these For-Sale domains. Arrington’s call for more APIs in general, was a good one. If a service has an API or RSS feed it can be used by a far bigger audience. People can then create mash-ups and extend the base service. If DomainTools controlled the end point of purchase, I can guarantee we would have released an API or RSS feed by now. Instead, I think we may release a Widget because we need users to come through us in order to generate any revenue on our free listing service.

It was a pleasure to hear Arrington speak and I recommend attending any event where he will be speaking. He mentioned he plans to hold a conference called “20″ later this year and I look forward to attending. BTW, Arrington mentioned that he bought 20.com for $70,000.00 and that this will be the conference’s domain name.