|
What is it about alarm clocks? The whole concept of an alarm clock is to shock your body out of the wonderful stupor associated with sleep and kick start the heart so that it immediately pumps blood around the body thereby forcing your happily sedated brain from a state of sleep to wakefulness.
 When you really think about it there is little difference between an alarm clock and the defibrillators used to start a person’s heart in the event of a heart attack. Speaking of which I typed into Google defibrillator to double check the spelling and the first item on the list was “discounted defibrillators”. I don’t know about you but I’m not sure that I would like a discounted anything starting my heart.
You can just picture it, there you are laid out on a gurney with 30 seconds to live when the doctors pull the “paddles” out and they don’t work. The flip side would be them explaining to my wife that yes the paddles worked but rather than zapping me at 1,000 volts the discounted version elected 10,000 volts therefore her husband was now a living vegetable.
And this is exactly the way I felt at 4:30am when my alarm clock kick started my heart with a primeval surge of blood which caused my brain to instantly snap awake and wonder if it was about to be eaten by a lion. In my case it wasn’t a lion but an international conference call with Godaddy that dragged me from my slumber. I love living in Australia but one has to ask why God didn’t make the world flat and on one time zone.
Now that I was awake and my blood moving at a more regulator rate around my caffeine system I felt relatively refreshed and ready for what was going to be a pretty important announcement from the biggest registrar in the world.
 The call commenced with introductions and friendly banter from two of my compatriots in the blogging world (Andrew Allemann and Adam Strong) followed by listening to Adam Dicker run through the new Godaddy GeoDomain Search Tool.
The tool demonstration started off with a map of the USA and a simple 1,2,3 bar which enticed you to type in a city, keyword and then spend money. We watched as Adam selected “Phoenix” (he even spelt it correctly) and then set a keyword of “hotel”. What resulted was a map of the area with “pins” marking every available domain that related to hotels and the geographic location.
The pins were coloured either orange for available or green for currently listed in a Godaddy auction. What was amazing was the fact that the map was covered in “pins” and each of those “pins” had the word opportunity written all over them. It was the domainer equivalent of being asked to sit down to a banquet.....with of course, a small tip to Godday in the form of a registration fee. Overall it was a really impressive performance.
What this means for domainers is that courtesy of Godaddy we can now blanket purchase domains for whole cities and keywords. I think that this is likely to instigate a degree of registration mayhem as domainers begin to realise just what is still available.
When asked what prompted the development of this tool Adam Dicker indicated that he was searching for insurance domains in Georgia and found that there were huge numbers still available. He then asked the logical question of what was available for the rest of the US and voila we now have the GeoDomainMap tool from Godaddy.
 So does it work outside the USA? The answer was not yet but big plans are in place to exploit some of the other ccTLDs. This is good news for the rest of the world.
As a first cut the Geodomain tool did a good job but I can’t help wondering if it is really going to entirely meet the needs of the domainer community as what it lacks is a “bulk” purchase option. I’m sure that we are all familiar with the “I want to spend obscene amounts of money on registrations please” button that is all too familiar at most registrars. Domainers typically deal with mass registrations and having to click on each location to add the domain to a list could become a little cumbersome. Given Godaddy’s reputation I’m sure that this will be looked at in version 2.0.
The biggest message that I received from the conference call is that Godaddy is very interested in the domainer space. This is a great positive step forward for them and I believe for the whole professional domain industry. The fact is that domainers register a lot of domains and Godaddy is in the business of helping us do this as efficiently and as painlessly as possible.....and they’ve even made selling us Godaddy T-shirts optional on the way out of our shopping carts. This is all good news to me.
Although the GeoDomainMap tool was astoundingly clever the conversation also diverged to other things Godday. What I discovered is that there is a lot under the “hood” that I haven’t explored. The premium listings area is a classic example of me potentially leaving money on the table. I would highly recommend that everyone take a look at the options and reports available in their Godday account as you may be very surprised at the information that they are now revealing.
So will I be reappraising Godaddy as a possible registrar as a result of the conference call? Absolutely. I may even set my defribullating alarm clock to get up for another conference call next month. In the meantime I think that the caffeine levels have dropped in my blood stream as my brain realises that lions aren’t actually on the prowl.
Trackback(0)
|
Article Archive 
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed
I can completely understand your position regarding some Godaddy's past behaviour, I have had similar experiences with other registrars as well.
In the article I was endeavouring to review what I thought was a pretty interesting new product. At the same time I think that there are some aspects to Godaddy that do deserve additional scrutiny in terms of the potential untapped information.
Many thanks for your comment though!