The Lucky Sunday Crowd

For those that come to the Live Chat + Drop today at 11am PST (in about 30 min), you’ll get a “special” treat. Beta Testers are truly the unsung heroes of software development, and GoDrops.com is no exception :)

There will be some interface enhancements making their appearance during today’s drop. GoDroppers can WATCH domains and when/if those names drop again, they’ll get an email letting them know. I’m changing terminology a little bit and going to call them “favorites“. I think that’s more easily understood over “WATCH” names.

The interface today will reflect this with nice little “favoritehearts that indicate a name your watching. Also, you’ll be able to add ANY name to your favorites: available, tasted AND taken names.

Come and try it OUT in about, um, 18 minutes now… :)

Something's Gotta Give

Scanning and picking names for everyday’s domain drop is VERY exciting — you never know what’s going to show up. But, it’s also very tiring. I’m thinking hard about how I’m going to open this up a little more. The first thing I’ll likely do is let GoDroppers pick the domains from their keyword list BEFORE the drop happens. I’m presently doing this now, and it amounts to about 1000 domains to sift through.

Since they are YOUR keywords, it makes more sense that YOU be the judge of the domain quality rather than me, although I may share the same keywords and will pick yours up anyway.

Anywho, just thinking out-loud here… :)

The "Unknowns"

After each day of domain drops, there are some domains that the GoDrops algo couldn’t automatically mark as being Tasted, Backordered/At Auction, or Soldmy “report” page has a extra column for these ;) So here I am rolling up my sleeves, checking out these names trying to figure out what to do with them…

SafeTherapy.com switched to nameservers NS1.DOMAIN-IS-4-SALE-AT-DOMAINMARKET.COM. Alrighty then! That’s what I like to see! http://www.domainmarket.com/

SimpleBills.com; another name padding a domain portfolio at http://www.moderndomain.com/

A bunch went to a Chinese registrars — I have little clue what’s going on with these…

Some go to hosting companies and still haven’t switched their nameservers… time will tell.

StiffNews.com is now being parked at DnParking.com. I think I signed on with them a while ago for parking my NNNNN.com names, but couldn’t get pasts certain pages dealing with domain submission. Maybe I should try them again… :p

WiseNames.com is a nice brandable for a domain portfolio. It was a single backorder at Pool today and has since switched nameservers.

y3y.net is now with Chinese nameservers at 365.com. Again, no idea here :)

What's It All About?

It’s been a while since I did one of these posts, so here goes…

What is GoDrops.com All About?

I created the back-end of GoDrops.com — the database and whois scanning software — to monitor nameserver and registrar changes of the GOOD names that appeared on the domain “drop” lists. There’s a five day window in which these names first appear on the “drop list” with a status of “pendingDelete” and then, well, drop and become available to register again at the end of that window.

Not so simple though, because (and especially before the ICANN refund fee came into effect) Domain Tasters would come in a take virtually EVERYTHING off the drop list and test it for traffic and/or attempt to flip it before the refund deadline of 5 days.

That’s where GoDrops.com came in. By monitoring these TASTED names, I could send myself an email when the names I liked dropped again at this “second” drop. Instead of checking by hand to see if names had become available again, I could just let the software do the work for me.

Once I got this working for me, I decided to setup GoDrops.com and invite others along for the ride. At first I just published a Available Names Feed on the home page and then using RSS. That was fun, but still not very engaging…

A little later, I setup the Live Chat + Drop which is still going strong now. Everyday during the “daily drop”, I open up a chat window and display the dropping names in a live feed next to it. Good Times!

But not good enough! :) Fast froward a bit and now GoDroppers can now watch their OWN names and get notification emailed to THEM when the names they like drop at the “second” taster drop. I haven’t counted them, but there have been A LOT of emails sent out over the past few months. People out there getting a real leg up, acquiring some great names and having a lot of fun along the way.

So, SIGN-UP and join us during the Live Chat + Drop held everyday starting at 11am PST!

We're Back Up and Scanning!

I’ve just started up GoDrops #1! It’s now updating the database with today’s drops that everyone missed because of the shut-down by GoDaddy. You can now check out the daily report page to see what you missed and WATCH the names you want to keep an eye on for later taster drops.

The amount of database traffic was too excessive for my measly shared-hosting account — during the Live Chat + Drop GoDaddy shut us down. Not to worry, I’ve paid for (AHHH!) a dedicated server now and will be doing another migration over the next couple days…

I’ve trimmed the database a lot just to get it up and running for tomorrow. The massive archive I’ve kept of WHOIS updates and daily drop lists was about 256 MB — Eek!

Slowing Coming Back to Life

The Blog is back up, but the domain part of it — the important part — is still not up, but I’m working on it presently. The backup of the entire database that runs all this is 256 MB of SQL, so I’m parsing like a mad-man bring bits of the site back to life a bit at a time.

Thanks for Hanging In There!

Surprise Guest Today! And, oh yeah, the server is back up…

We had a surprise guest today drop by the Live Chat + Drop. Thanks for coming! If they wish to reveal themselves, I’ll let them post a comment… but it was quite an unexpected treat! And now the bad news…

GoDrops.com #1 was temporarily down today during the typical eNom drop-time, but it’s up and running now. If you were watching any names, and eNom dropped them, you should be getting your emails now…!

Another great day of dropping domain names and tomorrow is looking just as good… We Go Live every day from 11am – 12:30pm PST during the Daily Domain Drop. Don’t Miss It!

GoDrops.com Version 3.0 is Here!

Well, here it is! I hope you like the new version of the site! It’s coded a lot cleaner and (I hope) the layout will make more sense to users. Still Very New so you might encounter a bug or three. If you DO find something wrong, sent a tweet at http://twitter.com/godrops.

Getting Closer!

I’m busy working on Version 3 of GoDrops.com… within 1 or 2 days it’ll be sporting a brand new theme that’ll hopefully make the user-experience better. GoDrops has picked up a few more members since I’ve been promoting it on Twitter

LOTS of domainers now joining up there due in no small part to NameCheap and their domain giveaway contests. Also NamePros has a new thread dedicated to domainers in the Twitterverse. I’m wrapping my head around Twitter’s API right now thinking of some cool GoDrops mashups to help YOU score some great names.

So, it’s been VERY busy of late, development projects everywhere you look it seems. With domain sales and domain parking income down, it’s time to roll-up those sleeves and get your hands Development-Dirty!

If you’ve got generic product names or product-brandables I can help you get stared with WordPress and a Plugin I’ve developed that cranks out eBay stores in No Time*! For more info on that, check out my alter-ego at http://standout.dropbuzz.com.

*some time actually required

Today's Names have been Fixed!

There was a problem today tagging the eNom catches as “tasted“. They’ve been tagged now and will show up on the daily report page and the member-watch page correctly.

GoDroppers can WATCH the names tagged as “tasted” and will receive an email when/if they Drop. How much does this cost? Only $199/mo… just kidding. It’s FREE! If you’re not already a GoDrops member, sign up today!