I've seen my share of bad web products. Some are bad because they are poorly implemented, others are bad because they are ill-conceived. The new Private Label Custom Domains product from FeedBlitz definitely falls into the latter category.

To be honest, I'm not even sure where to start here. From what I can gather, FeedBlitz wants me to pay them for the privilege of syndicating my content onto their domain. They're basically trying to sell subdomains on the feedblitz.com site at prices that are higher ($9.99 per year) than what you can pay to register your own real domain.

This is clearly a product without a market; I mean, who is this mythical customer that is out there wishing they could syndicate the content from their already-existing site onto a subdomain that they pay for at some other site? Nobody, that's who.

And I think FeedBlitz knows this. Follow me through the break for a few more thoughts on this.

TinyURL is the grandaddy of URL shortening services. Want to take a long URL and squeeze it into an easy to email, tweet, or otherwise share package? Just plop it into TinyURL and the service will spit out a short string of characters you can share with others. But historically those characters have been pretty much meaningless, making TinyURL addresses difficult to remember.

TinyURL recently rolled out the ability to create custom domains. Just type in a word or phrase that you want to associate with the longer URL, and you could get a domain like http://tinyurl.com/downloadsquad. There's just one catch: If someone's already used the URL, you can't use it. So you might want to use the name of your web site, spouse, or dog sparingly. Otherwise you'll wind up with someting like http://tinyurl.com/downloadsquad4h85sy.

[via WebWare]

You've got enough to worry about with your new Web 2.0 startup without having to come up with a clever name - never mind a matching domain name that's actually available.
Well, why not take advantage of Dot-o-mator, a crafty little web app that reaches deep into its dictionary and outputs a list of possible domains that would make Dr. Seuss proud.

Of course, coming up with a combination is only half the battle. You've got to somehow find one that hasn't been snatched up by some underhanded domain prospector. Dot-o-mator makes that easy, too, giving you one-click access to a multi-name availability check.

It's a great brainstorming tool, and can be a huge help in the struggle to brand your new web venture. We like it for the possibility of setting up private Gmail service on a domain like "skablab.com."

As expected, the international body that oversees internet domain names has voted to change the way top-level domains work. Right now there are only about 200 top level domains, with some of the most widespread being .com, .net, .org, and .edu. But under the rules adopted by ICANN today, companies or individuals will be able to register top line domains using pretty much any string of characters.

For example, why settle for www.downloadquad.com when you could have www.download.squad? The advantage to the new system is that it will be much easier to snag the domain you really want. The down side is that most web surfers tend to think in .com. It's already hard enough to remember whether you need to type in .com, .net, or .org. It could be much harder to find the page you're looking for if there are literally millions of options.

Of course, it's not like just anybody is going to go out and register a new top-level domain. The application fee will be upwards of $100,000. And even if we do wind up with 2000 or even 2,000,000 top-level domains instead of 200, odds are it'll still be easy enough to find the sites you're looking for thanks to these nifty things called search engines.

ICANN has also approved the use of Arabic and Cyrillic scripts for top-level domains.

There are plenty of ways to get a custom email address. You can sign up for service with Mail.com and choose from a number of custom domains. Or you can register a domain and use Google Apps to link it with an email account for free. But if you're a Yahoo! Mail fan, you might find that getting the domain name you want isn't the hard part. It's getting the prefix.

About 266 million people use Yahoo! Mail, which means the odds of getting an address like john@yahoo.com are pretty poor at this point. Today Yahoo! made things a bit easier by opening up two new domains, @ymail.com and @rocketmail.com.

If RocketMail sounds familiar, that's because it's the name of a company that Yahoo! purchased in 1997. The first version of Yahoo! Mail was built on technology developed by RocketMail earlier in the 1990s. You can snag an account using one of the new domains by visiting the new signup page.

Jealous of folks who have managed to snag international domain names consisting of nothing but their names? Engadget founder Peter Rojas has roj.as. And WordPress founder Matt Mullenwag has ma.tt. But unless you have an encyclopedic knowledge of domain naming conventions, you might have a hard time coming up with a domain name for your name.

DomainFinder can help. Just enter your name or any other phrase you like, and the web site will spit out possible domain names. You can't currently register your name through the site, or even figure out what country has the rights to a domain. But once you've found the domain name of your dreams, figuring out how to buy it shouldn't be too hard. Unless someone else has already registered downlo.ad.

[via Digital Inspiration]

As you know, anything you can do on the web you can do on web 2.0. In the case of checking to see if a domain is available, we've recently come across two new services, Ajax Lookup and Instant Domain Search.

Both services will check to see if a domain is taken as you type. At a first glance Ajax Windows would appear to have the edge. It has a prettier interface, and lets you search for 9 different domain types including .biz, info, us, ca, and uk.

But Ajax Windows is a bit on the slow side compared with Instant Domain Search, which, true to its name, shows results pretty much instantly. On the other hand, Instant Domain Search only checks for .com, ,net., and .org extensions. Of course, those are pretty much the biggies, right?

[via Killer Startups]

Calling all Google Apps users, your schedule might not be spot-on this Thursday.

Users of Google Apps can expect some downtime during routine maintenance of the Google Calendar Thursday April 26th, from 8AM to 9PM. As is expected with any sort of maintenance, downtimes may and will occur and in this case Google Calendar might not be accessible for some time. Scheduled maintenance during daylight hours, what gives, Google?

This blow to users scheduling sure does make us wonder if Google Apps is worth using for our main scheduling application. It is understandable that system upgrades have to occur in order to improve services, it just sucks that we are now forced to suffer.

For Google Apps support you can check out http://www.google.com/support/a/

Drop a comment on Thursday to let us all know if you were affected by the maintenance and approx. how long your downtime lasted for.

UPDATE: More info on the scheduled maintenance from Google:

Why are we doing an upgrade?
We are updating some of our servers as we continue to improve Google Calendar. This is a normal maintenance update, and as with all updates we look to minimize the impact to our end users.

How will this impact my end users?
The impact to your users should be minimal. Only a subset of your users should be affected by the upgrade. These users may have trouble accessing their Google Calendars for a short period of time, generally less than 5-10 minutes each.

Will Google Calendar be down from 8AM to 9PM PDT?
No. This is the window of time that the maintenance upgrade will take place. During this time some users will experience issues accessing their calendar, but only for a short period of time each.

Still holding out on that perfect domain name because you can't choose between a few different ones? Try not to hold back any longer, VeriSign, the company that controls the domain name registry for .com, .net, among others, is set to raise prices.

Verisign will initiate a 7% yearly price hike effective October 15, 2007, raising prices from a wholesale cost of $6/ year to $6.42/ year. This amount isn't a considerable difference, however VeriSign does have the right to renegotiate their contract with ICANN to continue a 7% per year raise indefinitely.

[via TechCrunch]

Google has announced a partnership with the Rwandan Ministry of Infrastructure, and the Kenya Education Network that will result in the use of Google Apps in Rwanda's educational institutions and government ministries, as well as in Kenya's universities. Both of these African countries will now have access to free communication tools that include email, shared calendars, instant messaging and word processing under
their institutions current domain names.

There are two main packages of the Google Apps that are being provided free of charge. With 20,000 users in Rwanda, The National University of Rwanda, the Kigali Institute for Education and the Kigali Institute for Science and Technology will have Google Apps Education Edition. The countries government ministries using Google Apps Standard Edition. 50,000 students at the University of Nairobi will be the first ones offered the Google Apps for Education in Kenya, with 150,000 additional students signing on at a later date.

Google has just issued a press release stating that this initiative will be helping Google to further organize the world's information, and to make it universally accessible and useful. Google's philanthropic Freudian slip is showing, don'tcha think? Gates can run around throwing money at the worlds problems all he wants, but I bet this secures Google a permanent spot in the hearts of many a socially conscious geek.

Google Apps for your domain allows domain owners to host email services at Google in a similar format to Gmail, with the added benefit of using their own unique domain. Administrators also have the ability to activate Google Talk, Calendar, custom start page, and domain web pages for different user accounts that they create. Google is expected to soon add Docs & Spreadsheets to this list as well, making it a complete online office solution for businesses. But BusinessWeek reports that Google will soon begin charging companies a subscription fee of a few dollars per person, per month. Business users are used to feature rich applications, so this might take some getting used to when it's released in full to the marketplace.

Microsoft has also unveiled Office Live where businesses can have access to web based email, calendar, project and task manager, and a customer organizer for $39.95/month. Zoho has a Virtual Office suite it has brought to the market that has no cost for individuals and $3 per user per month for an online hosted solution, and up to $295 per year for an on-premise solution consisting of webmail, calendar, web docs and sharing, tasks and reports, contacts, notes, bookmarks, instant messaging, WAP access, announcements, and multi-language support.

Hopefully when 2006 is over in a couple weeks people will stop putting the word "Ajax" in their web apps' names. I love the things Ajax makes possible, but as a marketing tool it's no longer useful, folks. Regardless, Ajax DNS is a pretty handy tool. If you enter an IP address or hostname it will do a DNS lookup, WHOIS lookup, ARIN IP lookup, HTTP header check, spam blacklist check, ping, or DNS traversal check, all from the same page. All of these tools have been available elsewhere for a long time--DNS Stuff comes to mind--but Ajax DNS has a nice "one box" approach for simple and fast lookups. If you find yourself doing these sorts of checks often, Ajax DNS might be worth bookmarking.

Joe Kraus of Jotspot, has announced today that they have been acquired by Google. Jotspot is a leader in hosted wiki application development. Jotspot was founded in 2004 as the first company to offer this type of hosted wiki solution. Jotspot's goal was to make wiki websites that anyone could update and add to, without knowing coding. Jotspot had a simple WYSIWYG editor, with advanced search and email integration components. Jotspot was not only aimed at smaller personal projects, it was also aimed at corporate intranets, project management, and help desks.

Jotspots hosted plans once sat from a $199 month for 5000 hosted wiki pages with unlimited users. To a simple Personal account with 5 users, 10 pages, for free. Could we possibly see the integration of one giant free plan from Google?

Currently, Jotspot is offline to users. The Palo Alto based company says to stay tuned to regain access to the system. Google is most likely merging all data and transferring the Jot system over to Google's servers. This is an exciting move by Google, again, in the online application environment, adding to their online suite of applications with the likes of Documents, Calendar, Gmail, Spreadsheets, and Apps for your Domain.

Check out some Jotspot screenshots after the jump...