People seem to be talking about the small, routine case Facebook just won for the domain face-book.com. Domain squatting is an extremely popular activity, despite the fact that it’s illegal. When a company goes large, squatters assume the company will pay them for their slightly different domain name. Squatters fail to realize that a simple complaint to the UN’s WIPO can invalidate their ownership. Squatting’s annoying, but it’s not going to change any time soon.

This reminds me of some of the other domains that Facebook owns, that as of yet haven’t been discussed. Face-book will surely forward to the Facebook homepage, but these other domains are more ambiguous. Here are some of the interesting ones. You can find all of these by searching for domains sharing namesevers with facebook.com.

• zuckerberg.net - The big, mysterious domain. Does it belong to Mark? Will it one day be his personal blog?
• somethingtoputhere.com - This one is likely for side projects, and maybe some private testing outside of the production environment. The name you might recognize from one of the original curious quips at the bottom of a Facebook page (“One day I’ll find something to put here”). The domain is already used to host the Which FB Employee Are You? application.
• facebooklet.net - At first, it sounds like “bookmarklet,” but the bookmarklet Facebook gives to its users uses the usual facebook.com domain. The kind of fun name sounds like a fan or employee’s nickname. Maybe it too could be a weblog one day? Why is it connected with the official facebook servers, though?
• facebookmail.com, which handles “over 50M email messages a day” according the probably outdated Facebook jobs posting for an email admin
• wirehog.net - I’m not sure if anybody remembers Wirehog, but Facebook endorsed it as a way for users to share files. These days, the project is dead… for now.
• Facebook also has lots of subdomains. Most of them are probably just what they sound like, but a few raise some eyebrows.
  • mirror.facebook.com - It’s not commonly known that facebook is a mirror for several software organizations. With their other contributions to the community, such as memcached, phpsh, Thrift, and PHPEmbed, this reflects great on the company
  • code.facebook.com
  • presence.facebook.com
  • extftp.facebook.com - obvious, but interesting to know
  • moat.facebook.com
  • themob.facebook.com - hopefully they won’t come to get me for publishing this

If you know more about the domain repertoire, feel free to contact me.