wwwtwitter.com, wwwbing.com, wwwapple.com and Others

Posted on October 18th, 2009 by admin in Domain News | 1 Comment »

Recent TechCrunch articles have brought attention to some interesting big company domain typos that are being squatted by opportunists.

wwwtwitter.com and wwwbing.com in particular were interesting because while wwwtwitter.com strangely points to techcrunch.com (owner is hidden behind a Godaddy privacy), wwwbing.com is currently sporting a website with the picture of a troll and text explaining that the domain name will be used to launch an upcoming children’s book called “Walter Will Wawrinka Bing”. Searches for the mythical character Walter Will Wawrinka Bing yield no results of value.

Patrick McAuliffe, the owner of wwwbing.com, also makes sure to point out that his website is in no way affiliated to www.bing.com – Microsoft’s recently launched search engine.

As TechCrunch points out, other big company domain typos of this kind that are being exploited are:
* wwwapple.com is a Mac applications review site
* wwwtechcrunch.com is a squatter
* wwwmyspace.com is a squatter
* wwwfacebook.com appears to be broken
* wwwgmail.com appears to be broken
* wwwcnn.com appears to be broken
* wwwdigg.com is a squatter
* wwwning.com redirects to some site called Streetball.com
* wwwespn.com redirects to magazines.com and smartly features ESPN the Magazine

Considering one of the most common typo mistakes is to leave out the “.” between the “www” and the site domain, it is interesting to note that none of these big companies have bothered to take steps to retrieve these domain names.