Yesterday Left of the Dot, the company that took over management of Christmas.com in October, rolled out free sub-domains called Christmas Family Pages.
Christmas Family Pages “are free for families and allow for real-time sharing of photos, recipes, Christmas traditions, wish lists, and memories.
“Every family who creates an account gets their own part of Christmas.com (e.g., SmithFamily.Christmas.com) which they can share by inviting the people they care about.”
“The functionality of Christmas.com Family Pages includes:
- Sharing photos from phones, digital cameras, tablets or PCs
- Saving family traditions & recipes for posterity
- Creating personal wish lists for all family members
- Sending invitations via email or Facebook
- Simple personalisation of the look and feel”
The overall concept is brilliant.
Get people to Chirstmas.com.
Get users to pick out the gifts they want, create a wish list and let Grandma and Uncles know what users want for Christmas. While the relatives or other invited friends are checking out family pictures on the subdomain.christmas.com, well they might as well buy the items on the wish list from Christmas.com
So its a social network mixed with a shopping site and is a arguably a better monetization concept than Facebook.com has been able to figure out.
The good news is that the subdomain is free and all the pics are stored for free in the cloud and only viewable by those you give access to, not friends of friends or anyone else.
The bad news is that the sub domains are subject to Terms of Service (TOS) of the site, which although don’t specifically talk about the sub domains, does talk about accounts in general and in that regard the site states:
“We may permanently or temporarily terminate or suspend your User account or access to the Service for any reason, without notice or liability to you, including if in our sole determination you violate any provision of these Terms, or for no reason.”
Moreover, if you think you can register a great generic term like Gifts.Christmas.com Shop.Christmas.com or Santa.Christmas.com the folks at Left of the Dot, tell me they have reserved an undisclosed number of such generic sub domains.
Frank Schilling’s Uniregistry is planning on offering new gTLD’s ending in .Christmas.
Uniregistry has stated that they aren’t going to hold back any reserved premium generic domains.
So domain names like Gifts.Christmas, Shop.Christmas or Santa.Christmas will be available for registration on a first come first served basis (subject to required Sunrise period for TM Holders)
According to Uniregsitry:
“.Christmas will be an online wonderland of websites dedicated to nothing else but this magical time of year.”
“More sharing, more festivities, easier gift-buying – all of the wonderful uses of the Internet in the Christmas season will be enhanced by the .
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