Today’s UUOPD (Unusual Usage of Premium Domains) website is Mix.com. Mix is not just a three letter domain, it is also a word with several uses. Apparently though, the owner thinks the best use is to put a picture of a girl in a bunny suit with a couple of fire extinguishers, next to a picture of a daffy duck jack-in-the-box Christmas ornament. I am starting to think that in order to get these images, the owner just went to Google image search, clicked the “I’m feeling lucky” button, and then did not get lucky.

Moving on, we see a couple of links that say “What we do” and link to Barnes and Noble. The link shows results for a search on Barnes and Noble for the search term “Bill Youdleman.” According to whois, Bill is the owner of this site. According to the Barnes and Noble website, he is an engineer on these CDs, which I guess explains why he registered this domain name.

Seriously though, congrats to Bill for having the foresight to register such a great name seventeen years ago, in 1991.

Today’s UUOPD (Unusual Usage of Premium Domains) website is Five.com. Five.com unusual because when you visit the site, all you see is a black background and “five.com” in tiny white letters in the center of the screen. You can’t really go anywhere or do anything, but hey, at least you know where you are, right? What also makes this website unusual is that if you look at the source code of this extremely basic looking website you will see that it is slightly more complex than you think; it uses css for formating and statcounter to track visitor activity. What exactly was the owner thinking? Perhaps the conversation went something like this:

Five.com owner: Sweet, I just registered five.com.
Five.com owner’s friend: That is a great name, what are you going to do with it?
Five.com owner: I have big plans for this one. First, I am going to show off my awesome coding skills by using css to create a black background. White is lame, all the cool sites have black backgrounds these days.
Five.com owner’s friend: You rock, and black backgrounds rule. What are you going to do next?
Five.com owner: Well, obviously I am going to use some tiny text to spell out the website address, and center that on the screen. Then I will add statcounter code to see who is visiting.
Five.com owner’s friend: Yeah, that way you can see who is visiting and where they are going on your site. There are going to be other pages right?
Five.com owner: No way. I don’t want to confuse people with complex navigation and too many words. I am just going to keep it simple.

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Click here for more UUOPD websites.

Today’s UUOPD (Unusual Usage of Premium Domains) website is Moscow.com. Moscow is the largest city in Russia and also the capital. With a metro area population over 14 million, it is ranked as one of the 15 largest cities in the world. Moscow is also the world’s billionaire capital, home to the largest number of billionaires in the world and in 2007 Moscow was named the world’s most expensive city. So why does Moscow.com qualify as a UUOPD site? Well, Moscow.com is owned by First Step Internet, an ISP in the small town of Moscow, Idaho – population 21,000. The website is used as a portal for news and information about Moscow, Idaho, but as it states on the middle of the home page:

Latest News:
There are no current news items.

🙄

Click here to read about previous UUOPD sites.

My friend Peter at Domainers Gazette has a great series entitled CTOPD, or Creative Targeting on Parked Domains. Similarly, I often stumble upon a premium domain name that is used in an unusual way. Inspired by Peter’s naming convention, I will call them UUOPD, or Unusual Usage of Premium Domains. Today’s UUOPD is purple.com. The site is, quite simply, purple. That’s it, just purple. Well, actually there are a few hidden pages and subdomains as well as a FAQ that contains some very funny answers:

Q: I like purple! What can I do?
A: You can be a part of the purple affinity program!

Q: This is really lilac / pink / other, not exactly purple. Could you make it more purple?
A: No. (What color it appears is also dependent on your monitor and its calibration.) Actually, the page used to be #DD00FF from circa 1994 until late 2006, resulting in numerous complaints that it was not quite purple. On 6-Nov-2006 I changed it to #7D26CD based on various recommendations. It’s darker than the old purple, but more clearly purple. You can compare it to blue here.

How long has purple been here?
A: Since 1994. Here’s an old response from whois when I still used NSI.

Q: I’m at a loss. What do other people think?
A: Check it out for yourself!

Q: This is weird / useless / other.
A: That’s not a question.

Q: Are there any games?
A: Yes, there’s the Purple Game. A purple squirrel is animated on your screen. Your task is to click on him. If you are successful, you win. Win or lose, the game continues without pause. Only the squirrel knows.

By the way, I played the Purple Game and won …I think, or maybe not. 😛