Who! wants! cursed.com? Yahoo! flogs! domains! in! multimillion-dollar! sale! Just when you thought there were no more good domains available, Yahoo! has decided to auction off a list of URLs that it says it no longer needs – and a lot of them are prime internet real estate. "This year, we found a huge list of domain names that the company has owned for quite some time," Yahoo! attorney Kevin Kramer …
While I generally agree with your point (I was quite glad when British Gas stopped using the largely nonsensical house.co.uk), B&Q do have the problem that B&Q.com is not a valid domain name, BandQ.com is unwieldy, BQ.co.uk makes little sense (and was also invalid until very recently) .
Why?
Maybe we're meant to parse it differently? I can never see penisland.net as a site that sells writing instruments (but they do, although also unfortunately claiming to specialize in wood), and as for the talent agent finder site www.whorepresents.com ...
(both perfectly SFW, in case you're wondering)
On the note of parsing... That horrific waste of space Experts Exchange wisely hyphenated their URL to avoid misdirecting innocent transgender users to their site. Though I still grin whenever I see their results poison my search results, reading it how I think it should read... ExpertSexChange.com :)
Hmm, okay, there's an association with Arabic, but who knows what batoota was supposed to mean. Hmm, Batoota films would like batoota.com. Ibn Battuta was "a famous traveler" so I could see a travel-related site for the ME.
But... How did Yahoo end up with it? That might be an interesting story!
I hate to beg for the upvotes, but how many of you think that Yahoo should focus on REAL value.
For a while I actually worked for a fellow who 'invested' a lot of the VC money in domain speculation. After a while I left and a while after that he went bankrupt. Yahoo is overdue.
My own favorite REAL investment for Yahoo would be to add some EFFECTIVE anti-spammer-business-model tools into Yahoo Mail. The basic idea would be to make it MUCH easier for people who hate spam to disrupt the spammers' business models.
Can you imagine how much value it would add to Yahoo Mail if the spammers were actually afraid of Yahoo because spamming there tended to lose money? I'm not advocating for vigilante tools, I just think we should be allowed to help with the targeting, especially faster targeting so that the spammers can't reach their suckers and get any money.
Then again, if I did have a button to push to nuke the spammers, I can't guarantee I wouldn't press it. At least not oftener than several times per second.
Yahoo should do the rest of us a favour and flog off yahoo.com etc, give all their money away to some nice useful charity and quietly disappear into the history books. Their starring role in the internet was only ever a few years long and they've lacked a credible raison d'être for at least 10 years beyond being the only mass mail company to offer push mail. Their recent bout of patent trolling and the barking mad state of their mail security suggests they are now way past their sell by date, and with plenty of money to sling around they are positively dangerous; now likely to do far more damage than good to innovation and future developments online.
If we want the shape of technology and the online world to look like the barren wasteland of a geriatric corporate wet dream, leaving a collective of clueless gits like Yahoo, Microsoft + chums in charge of the keys would be the way to do it; for anything more appetising, enforced retirement or euthanasia is the answer.
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