With website URLs, one of the most common typos is to leave out the “.” between the “www” and the site domain. Huge sites where people generally type in the URL manually are usually pretty smart about it. For example, wwwgoogle.com points to Google, wwwyahoo.com points to Yahoo, and wwwmicrosoft.com points to Bing (though, interestingly, Microsoft does not own wwwbing.com, that’s a squatter). Someone pointed us to a great one of these today: wwwtwitter.com.
Go ahead, stop reading this right now and go visit it. You’ll be back in a second anyway. Why? Because yes, wwwtwitter.com is the greatest redirect of all: It redirects to TechCrunch.
No, we don’t own it, nor do we have any idea who does. The registration is set to private, but the redirect is being done through GoDaddy. It was registered in November 2007, and won’t be up for renewal until 2014. So, whoever the wily person is out there who did this, good looking out.
Here are some other incorrect www addresses:
- 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
Update: As my colleague Robin Wauters points out, it’s also humorous that people own variations of twitter.com with more “t’s” up to twitttttter.com. Try them all! And yes, a squatter own twiter.com as well.
Wow. I can’t believe it! That’s a real TechCrunh fan then!
According to Domaintools.com (because compete isnt working right now?) this is the monthly traffic wwwtwitter.com gets.
Compete Rank:
#1,326,760 with 864 U.S. visitors per month
James F.
TwitterBackground.com
correct me if i ‘m wrong, i thought techcrunch was a twitter site. I read more about twitter on techcrunch than on twitter.com itself
+1, wwwtwittercrunch.com
@tenthings – seriously.
LoL @tenthings!
CEO:
mwd.com
“CEO:mwd.com”
do you feel cool now?
You just gave this guy an extra 2000 hits to his site : )
LOL. Pretty funny
That was my first thought. An obvious jab at Twitter’s most frothy mouthed fan.
comment of the year.
Finally we made TechCrunch!
…and you expect me to believe this? Anonymous schanonymous.
Holy shit, that’s awesome! Way to go whoever did that.
I would have been more entertained if everyone got redirected to some hardcore porn site, with sound effects and endless popups.
and now they have a tonne of links to that URL, they can redirect it to another URL once the “buzz” is over…
true. still funny for now though.
I found myself on Twiter.com today. damn squatters taking advantage of my lack of boomarks
> … dvantage of my lack of boomarks
You have a habit of leaving one letter behind … LOL
“Leave no letter behind”!
Yes funny, but also quite sad. Especially for you MG.
lol twittercrunch
Wicked
I think your campaign against twitter is becoming ridiculous. So what you guys are squatting on Twitter’s? That’s not newsworthy.
where’s the beef?
It should re-direct to a search for Twitter articles on TC. Still pretty cool though. Unless fo course they start adding viruses and spyware in somehow. A simple re-direct is cool though.
I thought it was interesting that the wwwmicrosoft.com redirect not only brings up Bing, but a Bing search for “wwwmicrosoft.com” And around we go.
no need for search, going to the TC homepage normally brings up plenty of twitter themed articles anyway
touche.
better yet would be: http://www.tech....com/author/mg/
thats full of text from a twit.
Just wonderful.
Didn’t you guys notice you were getting referrals from that domain a while ago?
clearly not enough to notice.
were you able to measure how many visits you got from wwwtwitter.com?
As Dom pointed out, isn’t it possible, at least remotely, that whoever controls this domain was waiting for something like this to happen (publicity because of the “odd” redirect) before changing the redirect to something advantageous for themselves?
sure. we’ll see.
Can TC looked at your stats and tell us how many referrals you are getting a month from this domain.
I am also interested in the number.
Jonathan French looks at this site?
what idiots! they should be filling wwwtwitter.com with ads to capitalize on this .
Hence, “dropout”.
Thanks for the best laugh I have had today!
So, if you redirect you’re not a squatter?
not if you redirect to techcrunch, no.
+1
if all squatters would redirect to TC, the world would be a much happier place
Why am I always the last person that thinks of this?
Imagine how much money you’d make, or could suck out of Google by owning http://www.wwwgoogle.com
I think I want to buy wwwyoutube.com now.
Get ready for a wave of wwwridiculoussites.com
Wolfram|Alpha has more info on that domain: http://www.wolf...=wwwtwitter.com
Wolfram Alpha does actually have a purpose then? That was the first time I have been to that site in a while!
dont forget wwwdigg.com or better yet, ww.masha***.com : P
That’s only TEMPORARY, folks. They’re using a 302 redirect, a temporary redirect, to redirect to TC.
HTTP/1.1·302·Moved·Temporarily
+1
I think your story just broke Twitter.
So who owns all those http://www.com?
TC (almost) ate my post hehe. I posted…so who owns all those wwwpr0nsites.com ones
you realize this is a joke at your expense right?
Hmmm I feel a bit icky when I visit http://wwwbasecamphq.com and see a rival collaboration application.
That wwwapple.com site is also a big plagiarizer. And not just a copy-paste job, he actually rewrites the intro to make it look like his own.
And I don’t believe you TechCrunch. About wwwtwitter.com. I don’t believe you.
hi what u guz up to lol byebye
Some news stories should go unpublished.
Some comments as well.
“Some comments as well” – heh!
So, how about the Twitter trademark infringement? Doesn’t seem to be something to be so proud of
And that’s why I love OpenDNS. They have this handy auto-correct feature (among other things).
So, do I interpret this to mean that you never check your server logs? Shouldn’t this have shown up as a referer?
I like how the tagline for Twiter.com is “Just what you’re looking for.”
When it so clearly isn’t at all what I was looking for.
I picked up http://techcrun.ch one day when I was brainstorming swiss domain names. I thought reposting techcrunch articles as lolcats might be a good idea but haven’t had the chance to keep it up to date.
Clever
I forget the second ‘t’ in Twitter sometimes. So I got to that squatter site. Well, I would have… if Firefox, WOT and probably OpenDNS, didn’t stop me.
>wwwning.com redirects to some site called Streetball.com
its a NING community. it means of some kind correct url.)
Death to Domain Name Squatters.
That is all.
That’s a real secret admirer …
Besides, twiter.com is one of the most visited squatter site of the day!
Hey TC. How much traffic do you get from wwwtwitter.com? Was it worth it?
As Daniel Lee suggested:
Cache Date: 2007-11-10
Registrant:
French, Jonathan adam@skytelemedia.co.uk
150 gt Portland St
London, London W1W 6QD
GB
+1.02071900300
Wow – that’s a MISTAKE, especially for companies such as Microsoft and congrats on the redirect =oD I love it. I wish the squatters would move people to other sites or sommmething
I’m a little surprised that the owners of the sites don’t try to make some kind of money from the urls. Setup adsense and some text or something.
does got businesscards generate enough to offset hosting costs?
too funny
Isnt this obvious? it is a very smart way of getting a link from techcrunch. Next week this will back to hosting adsense ads!
Nothing could be more apropos, unless of course http://www.twitter.com forwarded here.
It looks like http://www.snort.co.ke redirects to…. here!
twitter is a growing social bookmorking site….its really useful
It’s now forwarding to this very article…
Interesting that some peoples are still bothering the type the WWW in front at all anyway.
Don’t most of you just whack in the rest of the domain and then if it doesn’t resolve try it again with the WWW included?
Maybe I take FF and/or Google stuff for granted and that just takes care of all of this for me?
thats interesting……..
sumone is surely doing a small favour to techcrunch.. bringing sum twitter traffic urway..
I’m probably one of the first to find that out!
http://twitter....atus/3744938208
what would interest me – how many visits do you get via that domain?