Paul Sloan blogs about SoCal venture Citizen Hawk which has some familiar faces on-board. I tried the company's product on it's main page which seems to work pretty well after being prompted with a keyword. Jay Westerdal provides a similar service through his Domain Tools venture.
I have mixed emotions about services like this. On the one hand I think it is excellent for the domain industry that services such as Citizen Hawk's quash blatant TM violations, but as I pointed out in one of my earliest blog posts, not all typo's are created equally and there is a vested interest on the part of companies like CitizenHawk in perpetuating the never-ending battle against Typosquatters. If nobody is Typosquatting then these folks can retire and move on to something else. My concern is that the scope of what is considered Typosquatting gets expanded in an inequitable and unhealthy way as these services run out of REAL typo's to chase down.
We're probably a several years away from a potential scenario like that, but I wanted to be the first to point out the risks of over-reaching with services like these.. There would be nothing worse than generic name holders running off to WIPO with a report from CitizenHawk saying: "Look! Flickr.com is a typo of Flicker.com!" and then unfairly unseating would-be Web 2.0 startups with funny names (or the reverse, where a branded variant gets jealous and tries to unseat the holder of a generic name), all because CitizenHawk gave some "report" indicating that one man's brandable variant is actually another man's typo.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
I'd rather start a class-action lawsuit againts M$ for squatting the entire unregged domainspace and the .com extension mistypes.
***FS*** You know... they probably get maore traffic than all .copm .xom domain name mistypes than every single 'cybersquatter' in the world (combined).
Posted by: Robert | April 17, 2007 at 05:47 AM
Great article, but scary results. Next they will want to regulate hyphened vs. non-hyphen domains. Let free trade rule.
Posted by: Victor Edinian | April 17, 2007 at 12:52 PM
That's what I think too, this is why I find it amazing that they get away with it, and even get publicly known for pursuing typosquatters, while some legitimate domainers are wrongfully labelled squatters.
I cannot grasp why there is no organized effort within the domain community to go after them.
***FS*** IMO there will be a class action once enough public co's who figure a good way to bring it on behalf of their shareholders.
Posted by: Robert | April 17, 2007 at 01:39 PM
found another one http://www.domainscrub.com which finds the typos and is free
Posted by: Rick | May 14, 2007 at 08:08 PM