Squatting on Unfulfilled Dreams

I’m not much for domain squatting as a business, but when I get an idea I usually grab relevant domain names. Unfortunately ideas don’t always turn into sites, and so the list of domains that I own represents my own unfulfilled dreams. I’m young yet, and that’s why I keep renewing them.

HAVE POTENTIAL

big.ly: My original idea was to create a service for sending long messages over Twitter (for example when trying to answer a customer service question with coherent instructions), and the name was chosen to be a cousin to bit.ly. But then I decided that was too derivative and used the domain for hosting a CMS prototype. But now I’m planning to rename that CMS prototype. Luckily, I’ve started work on a series of rails plugins that are prefixed by “big_”, so maybe the site can be the home for my open source projects. That’s right, this domain has been home to three unfulfilled dreams.

www.blawg-and-order.com: There’s an actual project there, Sarah and I attempting to watch every episode of every Law and Order series, in order, while blogging each one. My dream would be to get so famous that Dick Wolf cast us in an episode (qualifying as personally huge, rather than internet-scale huge). I’d like to be a murder victim or employee at Faceplace. Unfortunately, we got sidetracked after eleven episodes. Only 800 more to go!

instahub.com, hubnik.com: The original idea behind CrowdVine was to do simple social network aware groups. CrowdVine has morphed into a conference specific service, but we’ll relaunch the general groups aspect. These are the two domains we’re most likely to use.

twixelquest.com: Turn the milliondollarhome page into some recurring subscription + marketing pyramid scheme. People could rent pixels for $1/month or get those pixels free for tweeting about them. In that way, there was automated revenue and marketing.

SMALL POTATOES

lngtwt.com, longtwt.com: I still want a way to send long form messages over twitter. I know that there are some services that exist, but I can never remember the names. Plus, I’m sure I’d want a little bit different functionality. I actually had a service up for awhile. Maybe I’ll find time to bring that back.

sharkbuzz.com: I had an idea for a social network of poker players, but with the hook that you would take notes on other player’s habits and tells. These notes would be like scouting reports and you could potentially trade them with other players.

gemjack.com: Originally a listing of all ruby gems back when that was hard to find. Now, I can’t think of anything to do with this.

ratemy(cat|dog|sports)videos.com, ratemyfighting.com, ratemyvideogamemoves.com: I had a dorky YouTube mashup for awhile called ratemydancemoves.com. For some reason I let that domain expire while keeping all of these. I still have the basic code and plan to put sites up for these. One nice thing about owning a few live sites is that they make good places for experimentation.

rssjack.com: Have the days of RSS past? It seems like there could still be cool tools to build around it.

tweetdb.com: I started building a web based twitter client before there was cotweet. If I ever to a twitter project, this is where it will live.

FOR SALE
groupjack.com, groupvee.com, membermojo.com: Alternate names for a groups project. Membermojo is the worst.

rubyhowto.com: I feel guilty owning this one.