In a bored moment the other day I was idly looking to see which (if any) other top level domain names are owned by twitter.com. The answer is, none.

This is quite a common mistake made by startups, they work incredibly hard to become a global brand and then discover that a bunch of domainers and/or squatters have taken the different, localised variations of their brand name.

However, it seems that Twitter might be about to remedy the situation as Smart Company (AU) reports that Twitter retained Melbourne IT company to manage its domain portfolio. My investigations (below) show that one of the biggest threats to Twitter’s brand comes from twitter.com.au so that might indicate a reason for choosing an Australian company, although there’s no official comment yet.

Let’s have a look at those other twitter TLDs that are polluting the brand of a company that might be worth as much as $250 million US:

Global TLDs

• twitter.net - a site for birdwatchers with a nice big link to twitter.com on the homepage. No real brand pollution here.
• twitter.org - a squatted domain with no website (the owner is missing out on some adevertising revenue methinks). If a website appears, it could do some brand damage to twitter but there are no immediate problems.
• twitter.info - redirects to a twitter users account. Nice use of the domain name and no brand damage here.
• twitter.me - another squatted domain with no website.
• twitter.biz - a squatted domain, currently parked at GoDaddy and displaying Twitter related products.
• twitter.mobi - another one that’s squatted without a website.
• twitter.name - redirects to twitter.us.

Country Specific TLDs

• twitter.us - parked at GoDaddy and showing twitter related adverts.
• twitter.co.uk - this should be ringing some alarms bells at twitter.com. The page sells advertising and donates the money to charity but it does complain about twitter.com’s policy of not verifying email addresses for new accounts and the story was picked up by the UK Guardian’s Digital Media blog. By all accounts the owner is not maliciously squatting the domain, nor does he want to sell so twitter.com could easily address his grievances to remedy any branding issues.
• twitter.com.au - This site seems to be an out-and-out attempt to cash in on the twitter name - lots of irrelevant adverts. Ev and Biz want to get this fixed ASAP.
• twitter.fr - redirects to twitter.com. It’s registered owner is Melbourne IT, so owned by Twitter.
• twitter.ie - parked and displaying adverts.
• twitter.es - parked but no website.
• twitter.ca - a nice little informational website that makes clear it has no affiliation with twitter.com.
• twitter.co.nz - parked and displaying adverts.
• twitter.tv - parked and displaying adverts.

All of the other ccTLDs I tried were parked with or without an associated website.

Misspellings

I tried a few misspellings of twitter.com (such as twiter.com and twiitter.com) and they were all parked too. There is also twittersucks.com for a few LOLs.

So, What Should Twitter Do?

It would make sense to keep the owner of twitter.co.uk happy and block signups using an email address from twitter.co.uk as that is what he wants and a quick, technical fix should satisfy the guy.

The squatted domains may be different. Twitter is still a very well-loved service but users are fickle and domain squatters could be quick to exploit (or provoke) bad feeling. If I were in Twitter’s position right now, I’d buy up a few of those top level domain names using a discreet third-party and (hopefully) without resorting to legal threats.

Most domainers are happy to make a quick buck and it is usually cheaper to buy them off than to pay a gaggle of lawyers. Keeping branding issues out of the press can also be a consideration, so a quiet back-channel can be useful. Whatever you think of the morality is domain squatting, it happens and successful companies will need to deal with it at some stage - better to do so earlier than later.

More On Twitter:

• How To Configure Twitterfox
• Twitter Beginners Guide
• Are You A Twitter Weirdo?