Social.com Domain Is Up for Auction: Who Will Bid?

After owning what would seem to be an attractive and much sought-after domain name, social.com, for more than 15 years, the current owner, Scott Carter, is passing the torch to the highest bidder, after a few halted attempts to drive value from the premium URL didn't take off. Scott, who was the creator behind BigTweet, who I covered back in 2008, is now putting the site up for auction, which might be of interest to any number of startups, established social media players, daily deal flingers or free e-mail accounts.

In 2010, BigTweet converted to Social.com, acting as a bookmarklet that could post to downstream sites (such as Twitter and Delicious), without being considered a competitor to Ping.fm (owned by Seesmic). But that didn't prove lucrative.

Another pivot later, earlier this year, Scott and I traded emails, where he told me he had moved Social.com to act as a multi-user Wordpress site, with users gaining their own social.com as a subdomain for their blog. As he said in March, "Still getting started, so I haven't spent much time promoting it."

So today, it was finally announced the domain itself was up for auction. As Scott wrote, "I've tried a few ideas with it, but never quite found the right way to develop it ..." and on June 8th, Social.com, along with other premium domains, from Data.com, Skills.com, and HorseRacing.com, is going up for bid in an extended auction at the DOMAINfest Barcelona Auction Series.

While I doubt social companies with major brand names (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, etc.) would be interested, maybe others would? Maybe LivingSocial wants Social.com? Maybe SocialText wants Social.com? Maybe there's a new aggregation site that would love to be Social.com? Maybe MySpace will rebrand again? Who knows. Maybe Klout gets Social.com and Data.com and has a field day? We'll find out when the auction completes on June 22nd.