Social.com Auction Postponed Due to "Technical Issues"

A little over two weeks ago, I told you the Social.com domain was going up for bid to any company looking to obtain the premium URL. The auction was set to take place today, along with other premium domains, including Fares.com, SUV.com and Data.com, but has been postponed, due to technical issues with the domain sellers themselves. So while many are curious if Social.com will go for less than seven figures, or if its high $5 million reserve will be hit, that answer will have to wait until another day - tentatively scheduled for next Wednesday, June 15th.

In the meantime, the Data.com URL actually did sell, ahead of the auction, to Salesforce.com, for more than the $1.5 million reserve set at the auction house. Scott Carter, owner of Social.com, said the deal closed Friday, and that "domains are sold prior to the start of a live auction if the buyer is willing to pay a premium over the reserve."

As Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch noted in his coverage of the Social.com sale last week, Scott put the domain up for sale in 1997 for $50,000, but for two years, nobody bid and he pulled it off the table. By late 2004, Scott again was asking around to the value of the domain, with domain watchers quoting high five figures to low six figures.

In that September 2004 thread, Scott wrote, "I appreciate all the replies. The range was anywhere from $x,xxx to $xx,xxx. I must admit that I had expected it would be valued closer to the 7 figure range but of course I'm a little biased. I'm going to hold onto the name for now..."

Following 2004, we saw the social media and social networking explosion, so much of the world assumes Scott will get much more than the estimates from seven years ago, even if reactions to today's canceled auction brought out skeptics, claiming today's "technical issues" were a cover for buyers not meeting the high reserves. The world loves a conspiracy.

"I'm still waiting for details on why their systems went down today," Scott wrote me in an e-mail this afternoon, adding, "Not a great day."

With Data.com selling above its reserve, it shows there is interest at the 7-figure level for premium names. We're going to have to wait another week to see if Social.com is one of those companies, or if it ends up going for a lower amount.

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.

BigTweet Sends Tweets from Any Web Page (Up to 280 Characters)

In one of my "couldn't be more wrong" predictions for the world of tech in 2008, I predicted that Twitter would move away from just offering text updates on its microblogging site, and would instead expand to possibly let users add pictures or even video, giving a better answer to "what are you doing?". Instead 2008 has been more about the site's native growth, the acquisiton of Summize, and just keeping the service up. Luckily, third party developers are finding new ways to leverage the site. Among them is a new bookmarklet-based site called BigTweet, that lets you share Web pages you find around the Internet and send them to your Twitter account. BigTweet even tries to double down on Twitter by letting you send upwards of 280 characters, should you want to. (Updates over 140 characters are broken into separate Tweets)


Sending a tweet from BigTweet's bookmarklet, to 280 characters
The concept of a bookmarklet is something that has grown increasingly familiar to users of various social networks. I've got a folder full of them that lets me add items to social networks like socialmedian, Twine and FriendFeed, or other more specific items, like those that let me add bookmarks to Delicious, and RSS feeds to Toluu or Google Reader.


The same tweet, with some symbols added in for emphasis.
BigTweet's bookmarklet enables you to share any Web page you are browsing and send it to your Twitter account. The full URL is truncated with the bit.ly URL shortening service (see their blog for an update), and prepopulates the title of the page with that on the site you are visiting. BigTweet lets you add a description of the URL you are sharing, all the way to 280 characters if you wish, counting down to your limit, and even add special characters, from smiley face emoticons to arrows, and other symbols.


Thanks to Twitter Still Needing OAuth, My User/Password Combo Go Here.
Like many, many other services that leverage the Twitter API, BigTweet requires you to enter your user name and password to get registered. The author, Scott Carter, promises he won't misuse your data, which has largely gone unquestioned by every other Twitter 3rd party service, with the exception of Twitterank a few weeks ago.

Sharing items on Twitter is something many are looking to do, in addition to using the site to post their location (from BrightKite), their new blog posts (from Twitterfeed), or just about anything else these days. BigTweet's bookmarklet means you can do it from anywhere, without leaving that page. The service's added symbols and double the characters are also a plus.

Hardcore FriendFeed users might find the service slightly redundant, as they can use FriendFeed's bookmarklet and have the native FriendFeed item hit Twitter as well. But the FriendFeed bookmarklet, as cool as it is, won't allow for custom symbols and will cut off anything beyond 140 characters, so there's room for another bookmarklet in your browser bar. You can check BigTweet out at http://bigtweet.com/.