With website URLs, one of the most common typos is to leave out the “.” between the “www” and the site domain. Huge sites where people generally type in the URL manually are usually pretty smart about it. For example, wwwgoogle.com points to Google, wwwyahoo.com points to Yahoo, and wwwmicrosoft.com points to Bing (though, interestingly, Microsoft does not own wwwbing.com, that’s a squatter). Someone pointed us to a great one of these today: wwwtwitter.com.
Go ahead, stop reading this right now and go visit it. You’ll be back in a second anyway. Why? Because yes, wwwtwitter.com is the greatest redirect of all: It redirects to TechCrunch.
No, we don’t own it, nor do we have any idea who does. The registration is set to private, but the redirect is being done through GoDaddy. It was registered in November 2007, and won’t be up for renewal until 2014. So, whoever the wily person is out there who did this, good looking out.
Here are some other incorrect www addresses:
Update: As my colleague Robin Wauters points out, it’s also humorous that people own variations of twitter.com with more “t’s” up to twitttttter.com. Try them all! And yes, a squatter own twiter.com as well.
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
