Earlier this year, we speculated on when Facebook would launch APIs for Facebook Ads to allow performance marketers to automate ad management. Well, it appears it’s happening now: recently, Facebook started beta testing its new advertising APIs with just a few agencies around the world.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the tests, saying that it will “open up to some more advertisers in the next week or so.”

This is the kind of thing that could give larger advertisers the kinds of tools that are expected from real companies. In other words, Facebook is modeling Google and others in taking the necessary steps to make it easier for advertisers to do what they best: advertise. Based on the last post I did which was bemoaning the near indifference of Twitter’s leadership regarding revenue generation this is refreshing.

Smith explains further

Because those tools have never existed for Facebook Ads, performance advertisers have had to either manage their Facebook Ads campaigns manually, or hack their own tools. Now, Facebook is testing simple yet powerful APIs that allow agencies and advertisers to create thousands of ads with different creative and targeting permutations and optimize bids in real time.

So while there is nothing to see quite yet there is at least something to look forward to. We are in a day and age where the changes in the marketing and advertising landscape are outpacing the ability to take advantage of them. Social media is sweeping everyone away with its constant talk of potential but now it is maturing in some areas to the point to start to deliver. We are starting to get past the sizzle and Facebook is looking to finally serve the steak.

Let’s hope this is just the start of this kind of improvement on the horizon. Lord knows we need it.

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If the domain name aptly represents the industry or niche it does business in, it can get direct traffic where users type it into the address bar and reach the site. It also represents your company in cyberspace and is the first port of call online.

There are two tricky issue involved in the buying of domains. The first is that you cannot use comparable sales figures (as in the case of real estate). The second is the intrinsic value of the domain name itself (as in the case of vehicle, jewellery etc). These are intangibles and cannot be used as bargaining chips at the negotiating table.

This post is based on an interesting writeup by James Siminoff, webpreneur and owner of phonetag.com and grid.com. James spent over $100,000 on grid.com and feels that valuable domains can be found for $10. The domain vibrator.com sold for $1 million and of late, toys.com sold for $1.25 million.

James has used his personal experiences in buying domains to arrive at a step by step process that should help you secure the domain you want.

1) Brainstorm Domain Names:

Maintain a list of the niches that interest you. When you look for short attractive names, chances are that they are taken most of the time. But the variations or combinations of those domain names can still be available. To help in your quest, James mentions a great resource called Dotomator.com

2) Check for availability of domains of interest:
Godaddy is a big player in the domain name registration business. You can use their bulk upload features to upload your list of domain names. The interface will tell you which domains are available and which domains have been taken.

Another good domain registration service is instantdomainsearch.com where availability of .com. .net and .org domains can be ascertained and a direct link to Godaddy site for registration of availbale domains is included. You can also do an encrypted search on this site.

3) Visit the auctioneer sites:
Domaintools.com provides a whois lookup of all expired, current and deleted domains. Sedo.com is an excellent site where you search for availability of domains and also park, buy and sell domain names.

4) Prune your domain list:
Domains can be broadly classified into four categories.

a) Real Business:
These are domains used for existing businesses. Such domains are very hard to get as they serve existing business interests. James mentions that he bought the domain trustme.com from an existing business and it was a hard slog getting it and increased the price as well.

b) Domain Squatter pages:
This is a common practice as people look at it as a business venture. Registering the maximum number of possible variations of a word as domains at $10 per head per annum gets the owner revenue if these domains are parked on sedo.com for example and sedo also gets to share the revenue with the owner. A good example is the Kauai.us domain.

Kauai is the oldest of the main Hawaiian islands and is a tourist destination of immense interest. A screenshot of the kauai.us site shows it is a parked domain monetised for Asdsense with the owner hoping that someone would want to hopefully buy it at the “right” price in future.

Such sites are easy to buy as most of them are up for sale. In the above example, there is a Buy this domain sign.

c) Pages with Site Under Construction sign:
There are two ways about it. Either a business is preparing its site for launch or a person has registered it and forgotten about it. Such domains are ideal to target. James has had good success with such domains.

d) Dead Pages:
Nothing comes up when the domain name is typed into the address bar. It is hard to predict whether it is available or not. James talks about the case of nobel.com, a domain owned by an insurance company. He already owned nobelcom.com and he figured it would cost him a fortune if he contacted the CEO about it.

Contacting the VP of the IT divison helped him plead at a human level and the company consented to sell the domain to him. James picked up the domain in lieu of something that would have cost $50,000 or more.

5) Contact the owner:
If a site is for sale, the link displayed or contact us link should enable you to contact the owner. Such messages have a higher success rate in making contact. Use the Wayback Machine to look at the old pages and contact details.

If unsuccessful, use the standard whois on a site like domaintools.com. It also offers a historical whois version.

6) Various approaches to contacting the domain owner:

James feels it is best to contact the owner first and find out if the domain is for sale and not make an offer straightaway.

a) Direct Contact:
If the owner is a student or someone who cannot be searched for on Google, then direct contact is the best way. James says that when he bought the domain grid.com, he had a hard time tracking down the real owner and accidentally revealed his webpreneur details to the owner by email. This mistake raised the stakes by about $50,000.

So, if you have documented success as a buyer, you are best not to reveal it as the status of the buyer can impact the final price.

b) Hiding your details:
A cheap way of making contact with the owner is throug a gmail or yahoo account with username as a pseudonym and the email signed with a name like Joe. This does not elicit much contact from the owner as you may appear to be a scammer.

An expensive way of doing this is through paid services which allow you to mask your details when contacting the owner. Godaddy and Networksolutions offer such services. James has had no success using this technique.

c) Optimal way is to hire a PR or law firm:
Hiring a small town law firm or PR firm has given James the best success in clinching domains like trustme.com and phonetag.com The service costs between $100 and $300. The owner can see she is contacted by a real person from a company and this prevents the price from getting inflated.

7) Domain Valuation:
James says that he has no comparables to evaluate domain name prices. It all boils down to what the owner is asking for. James does not have a budget in mind when approaching owners as he looks at them as assets as in real estate.

8.A rough guide to evaluate the domain name:
a) Number of letters in the domain name:

3 to 4 letter domain names are expensive and can sell between $5,000 and $500,000. A name with 5 letters and more becomes cheaper.

b) Number of words in the domain:
One word domain is high value. The more the number of words, the less valuable it becomes.

c) Easy to spell:
The easier it is to spell the domain name, the more valuable it is.

d) Reason for typing the domain name into the browser:

James draws a parallel between college.com and phonetag.com (he owns the latter). It would be worth getting a traffic analysis report from Compete.com The natural search traffic to college.com woud be much higher compared to phonetag.com

e) Natural flow of the domain name:
The more natural the flow of words is, the higher the domain would appreciate in value. James points out that a word like phone tag would be more natural than a random flow like micro soft (separated by a space).

f) How does this domain name affect your business?
A better domain name is more viral and easy to remember reducing customer acquisition costs. The worth of each customer and the current acquisition cost of each customer need to be factored into the final value.

9) Negotiation:

a) Reacting to ridiculous offers:
James mentions that the owner of bulk.com wanted $800,000 and he offered $35,000. The sale did not go through but owners can be sitting on their high perches with overexpectations.

b) I am not sure – what do you think?
The owner who has this question wants to negotiate for sure. James says he goes in at 20 to 30% below the bottom range of his budget.

NOTE: There can be legal issues here. If you write back saying you can buy it for $5,000 it becomes a legal contract that can be enforced in court. James advises that it is good to put in a rider something like – I can buy for $5,000 pending all terms are agreeable.

c) Spooking the seller:
If you agree to a price straightaway, then the owner is bound to develop sellers remorse concluding that he has underpriced the domain than what it is truly worth. James had this problem when buying grid.com and had to sue the owner to enforce the contract (out of court). Rather than get into legal situations, you would be well off negotiating the price down with the owner.

d) If the price is right:

If you feel that the seller’s price is close to the market price, then there is no need to be over cautious about it. Just settle for it.

10) Get the agreement:
If the seller says yes to your offer, then it is a contract that is enforceable in court. Get the assent in writing. Once that is done, open up an escrow account at escrow.com and transfer the funds at the earliest. The quicker this is done, the harder it is for the seller to back out.

Enjoy the original writeup for 10 tips to buy a domain in its entirety. You cannot fail if you follow this process to the best of your ability depending on your individual cirumstances.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search marketing company offering both natural search and paid search services to their customers in New Zealand and Australia.

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According to an email sent to customers, on  October 9th the company will shut its servers that “that supports protected songs and albums purchased from our site”.  Unless you back up your files by burning them to CD,  you will “no longer be able to transfer your songs to other computers or access your songs after changing or reinstalling your operating system or in the event of a system crash”. (Full text of the email after the jump.)

iTunes offered an paid upgrade to mp3′s after it made the DRM-free transition and still supports the tracks it sold with DRM. Other download services like Napster and Rhapsody were forced to extend their transitions after complaints from consumers.

Full text of Walmart.com’s email:

From: Walmart Music Team
Date: Fri, Sep 26, 2008
Subject: Important Information About Your Walmart.com Digital Music Purchases

Important Information About Your Digital Music Purchases

We hope you are enjoying the increased music quality/bitrate and the improved usability of Walmart’s MP3 music downloads. We began offering MP3s in August 2007 and have offered only DRM (digital rights management) -free MP3s since February 2008. As the final stage of our transition to a full DRM-free MP3 download store, Walmart will be shutting down our digital rights management system that supports protected songs and albums purchased from our site.

If you have purchased protected WMA music files from our site prior to Feb 2008, we strongly recommend that you back up your songs by burning them to a recordable audio CD. By backing up your songs, you will be able to access them from any personal computer. This change does not impact songs or albums purchased after Feb 2008, as those are DRM-free.

Beginning October 9, we will no longer be able to assist with digital rights management issues for protected WMA files purchased from Walmart.com. If you do not back up your files before this date, you will no longer be able to transfer your songs to other computers or access your songs after changing or reinstalling your operating system or in the event of a system crash. Your music and video collections will still play on the originally authorized computer.

Thank you for using Walmart.com for music downloads. We are working hard to make our store better than ever and easier to use.

Walmart Music Team

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Day five of the pirate bay trial was just as interesting as day four, but this time without the shouting, instead the judge took a quick break and explained the rules to the prosecution. What was interesting though was that the rules had to be explained. There were also questions raised about Peter’s political beliefs, which is also another way of trying to unsettle the defendant into saying something they would not have otherwise said.

Upon restart, the judge said the decision is that any new material the Prosecution is planning to bring up needs to be submitted before the questioning has started, as is proper. The Prosecution then claimed to hand over all their surprise material they were holding and the Court took another break so that Peter could read through everything. This was later confirmed to be 9 new documents. Source: Torrent Freak

You can read more coverage on this at MP3 News Wire; the end result was that nine new documents were entered into evidence so that everyone would have a chance to read them before they got questioned about the contents. In the longer run, this is a good thing, and something that should have been done before they got to trial. As a way to disquiet and upset a defendant though, this is pretty much so a standard when it comes to trial. The more upset you can get a defendant, the easier it is to get them to say something that they didn’t want to say.

What was also confusing for the prosecution was the loose organizational style that the pirate bay has. Some companies are highly organized, some are not. From the testimony it seems that the pirate bay is a loosely coupled organization, with people often doing their own thing, without coordinating what they are doing. This is often what you will find in a startup with a small number of employees. It is not an unusual organizational style but it makes it harder to understand how the company actually functions. Ars Technica and ZDNet go deeper into this, along with the idea that the prosecution has a hard time believing in the loosely coupled organizational style of the pirate bay. Given what I know about them, this is not a surprising thing, many small companies are loosely coupled when it comes to management style, and hierarchy. ZDNet continues with the idea that what is becoming the “I don’t know defense” is inherently unbelievable and may hurt the pirate bay in the longer run.

As a separate article, Torrent Freak goes into why the people who actually do rip new content, or share pre-release, corders, and others are not so impressed with the Pirate Bay. Following the threads of how mules, organized crime, rippers, coders, and others work as an entity when it comes to pirating content there is a definable hierarchy for that organization. No they do not like the pirate bay, or other trackers because in some ways it also cuts into organized crimes profits as well. You also have to take into account insider leaks as part of the problem.

The recent upset over the pre release of the U2 album, including wild releasing of rumors via Techcrunch about Last.FM giving information to the RIAA about who could be listening to the new album. This has been roundly denied by Last.FM as well. There is a motive here, what is interesting is that the article on this coming from the trial is also something that needed to be generally better known. There is a hierarchy here, the pirate bay is on the low end of the totem pole when it comes to full blown DVD pirating and stamping.

In all an interesting week when it comes to the Pirate Bay trial, you can see all my coverage here on Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and Day 4.

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And last week friendfeed did something very important: made it a lot more possible to do powerful real-time web searches.

First, the problem with friendfeed is it is too geeky. But ignore that problem for a moment, because if they don’t get it right, or make it something that the mainstream wants, well, you’ll see the same kind of search show up on Facebook (which has been making moves lately to be much more open) or Twitter.

So, why is this stuff working?

Well, because it’s with your friends and THEIR behaviors. Your friends are a lot more trustworthy than anyone else. How do I know that? Because while I was in Davos George Colony, CEO of Forrester handed me the results of a report they did on Trust and they found that people you know are the most trusted. Far more than corporate or personal blogs. Yes, I know you don’t trust me that much. That’s OK. I don’t trust your blog much either.

But, if I know you (thanks to Twitter, Facebook, and friendfeed I have gotten to know thousands of you) I can build a much better recommendation engine.

Oh, and even more troubling for Google is that Facebook and friendfeed have a lot more metadata to study.

What is metadata? It is data about data. Well, in Google’s case, the metadata is the linking behavior of people in the web.

But look just on friendfeed. What’s the metadata there? Everytime I click “like,” something I’ve done more than 16,000 times now, I’m adding metadata. Everytime I add a comment, something I’ve done more than 8,000 times now, I’m adding metadata.

What other metadata is there? Well, they still can study linking behavior. I can link to my discussion of how cloud computing will change programmer behavior, for instance.

What else? Well, friendfeed knows how many of my friends also liked that item. They also know how many people clicked on that item (although they haven’t surfaced that information yet).

So, now, let’s look at search.

First, if I need to know who the best retailer is to buy, say, a Canon 5D Mark II, is it better to ask the people I know, like I did here on friendfeed, or go to Google and deal with the SEOs? Try doing that search over on Google. I did. Do you find a single retailer? I didn’t.

So, now, let’s get to friendfeed’s search.

Let’s do a search for anyone who has written about the Canon 5D MK II but lets constrain that to posts that have at least one like and at least four comments. Here’s the search. Note that the post I wrote just one minute ago is already in the results page. This is the real-time web.

Google won’t see that friendfeed item for hours and, even if Google’s spiders index it Google does not have enough metadata to study to let it do this kind of search.

Let’s keep going.

How is this for searching news? Well, right now Australia is burning. So, let’s search for “Australia fires” but lets constrain that search to anything that has five or more likes and five or more comments. Note the quality of the conversation that comes back.

How am I doing this? With friendfeed’s advanced search.

But it gets better than that.

How about we search for all Tweets that talk about the Australian Fires? We can do that.

“But can’t search.twitter.com do that better?” Well, yes, but can it also just show you all the Google Reader items people have shared? Like friendfeed can? No.

Can Google search show you all the Upcoming.org events that mention SXSW? No, but friendfeed search can.

Can you easily see all the YouTube videos that have the word Grammy in them? Probably over on YouTube you could do that. But can you now constrain the videos to the ones that have gotten some comments? With friendfeed you can.

Now, keep in mind that there aren’t many people on friendfeed yet. The numbers of comments there are not even close to enough to make all searches satisfying. But, look at friendfeed’s competitor Facebook. They have more than 150 million users already. What if Facebook were to get a search like friendfeeds?

Now do you start to see why I’m using Google less and less?

Lew Moorman is right.

Oh, and I got lots of answers to my Camera question before I was even done with writing this post.

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