A bunch of domains but the strategy makes no sense — Facebook registers

Firm appears to be registering previously expired domains, but isn’t picking up some obvious domains.

Facebook registered at least 22 domain names yesterday, many of them typos of Facebook. But the strategy is perplexing. Here’s the list:

betafacebook.info
facboox.com
facebocke.com
facebof.com
facebokcasino.com
facebookcredets.com
facebookkcredits.com
facebooklinker.com
facebookpeople.info
facebooksight.com
facebooon.com
facebooor.com
faceebot.com
faicbooc.com
faseboox.com
faxcebool.com
faxehook.com
feook.com
photosonfacebook.info
wwwfaceboil.com
wwwfacebppk.com
wwwfeibook.com

So why am I perplexed? Here are some examples:

Photosonfacebook.info – OK, a standard defensive registration. Except that Facebook hasn’t registered any other major TLD for this domain. Even PhotosOnFacebook.com is available at the time of writing.

FacebookPeople.info – the .com is taken (may be expiring), but .net, .org, etc. are available. Why .info?

BetaFacebook.info – someone else has registered .com, so I understand the idea to get other versions and also find a way to get the .com. But why just the .info?

Facebokcasino.com is also interesting. They don’t own FacebookCasino.com. Ditto for wwwFaceBoil.com. Someone else owns FaceBoil.com.

But I think I’ve found a common theme amongst these registrations. The sample I’ve checked shows that they were previously registered and expired. So perhaps Facebook wants to snap up anything that has expired.

Yet if someone would potentially register PhotosonFacebook.info again, wouldn’t you want to protect the .com, too?

Here’s another data point to consider. Yesterday I noticed that logon-facebook.com was freshly registered by someone other than Facebook. Historical whois records suggest that Facebook once owned this domain. Maybe the firm is trying to learn from its mistakes?

Also on the wire