Just over a month ago, I was shocked when I was force-fed a twitter screen takeover while looking at my domain names registered at GoDaddy. Immediately, I did some news searches to see if GoDaddy had purchased Twitter because it seemed very out of place. There were no such announcements. In fact, there was very little news about this development.
Every time I’m in my account tweaking my domains, I can’t help but notice the twitter promotion overload. I can’t help but wonder why GoDaddy would take such a keen interest in helping to fuel more twitter accounts. From a service perspective, it is pretty lame because it is already incredibly easy to check name availability and sign up for twitter. I could think of a hundred other features GoDaddy should build and promote instead. If it were a two-way arrangement, where Twitter promotes domain registration for Twitter user names, then I could see the benefit.
So why do you suppose GoDaddy is pimping Twitter so much? Is GoDaddy going to buy Twitter? Is Twitter paying GoDaddy for this treatment? Is GoDaddy’s product development team overly caught up with Twitter & group-think led them to believe this add on would separate them from other registrars? I have no idea, but it will be interesting to watch this over time.
Here are more screenshots showing how much GoDaddy is pimping out Twitter within their domain dashboards:
August 7th, 2009 at 8:10 am
I saw that the other day when helping a friend with his GoDaddy account. It struck me as odd, too. If I had to chose a reason–without additional information on business arrangements, if any, between the companies–I’d pick your “group-think” option. Everyone’s caught up in Twitter these days and I can just imagine GoDaddy’s product team lead saying “We have to integrate Twitter!” The devs would look at each other and say “What? Why? That doesn’t make sense,” but since management wanted it, they did it.
The real proof will be whether the feature sticks around in a year.
August 7th, 2009 at 10:19 am
Add another vote to “group think.” Amazing how many execs jumping on the twitter bandwagon without even knowing what it is. I’ve never seen GoDaddy put extra features in that weren’t intended to make them extra money. Strange happenings!
August 11th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
In my experience working with GoDaddy, or, should I say, in my experience being worked by GoDaddy, it’s true that they would not do anything unless motivated, in some way, by profit – or ego.
With respect to domain names, the goal is to get you to pay to register and to keep the domain with GoDaddy until our Sun becomes a supernova, or about that long.
Once you register a domain with them, it’s difficult to move it. So if you were to create a matching Twitter account and use it to the point that you built a following, you would be less likely to stop using the domain. On the other hand, if you registered a domain with GoDaddy only to discover later that the matching Twitter username was already taken, it’s pretty certain – given the success of Twitter – that you would let the registration lapse and find a different domain to use. And then there would be a chance that you might use a different registrar.
August 18th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
Makes perfect sense to me.
If you are looking for a domain name for a new project/biz/whatever, are you not also going to try to get the associated twitter account with it?
I assume there is (or will be) a twitter account squatter biz in place just like domains.
August 30th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
The matching twitter name increases the value of the domain as a “branding package”, plus increases affinity if the twitter account is used… the user is more likely to keep the (undeveloped) domain if they use the twitter account (?)