TechCrunch on Wow.com, Facebook.fr

Two domain name stories hit TechCrunch today.

Tech blog TechCrunch has two interesting stories regarding domain names today. TechCrunch was founded by Pool.com founder Michael Arrington.

The first is regarding Facebook.fr, a domain that used to forward to facebook.com. The domain now leads to “Facebook Paris”, a competitive social network:

…Actually Facebook is starting to be quite popular in France by now, even though the interface is just in English. Until today Facebook.fr was even redirecting to Facebook.com and one would have assumed that the firm had purchased the fr URL until the roll out happens.

But it looks like someone else purchased the French domain name, since as of today the redirection points to another social network called “FaceBook Paris”. The whois registry does not reveal much of the identity of the owner (registered as anonymous).

Second is a rumor that AOL has decided what it will do with its valuable Wow.com domain name — turn it into a social network for World of Warcraft:

The wow.com domain name has laid dormant since at least 1998, when it was purchased by AOL along with other assets of Compuserve. The domain has been coveted by a number of AOL business units over the years, though. At one point there was a discussion of it being used to house the netscape social news assets (they eventually settled on propeller.com).

If our source is correct, a decision has been made as to the long term use of wow.com. It has been transferred to the AOL Games group and is right now being turned into a – you guessed it -World of Warcraft social network.