Smells like Bean Spirit

So told a sentence in a song called Patience composed and sung by Guns N’ Roses. This is about a domain : beanspirit.com. Did you just click the link? Yes, you are in the same website. I own this domain right now.

About 2 years ago i decided to choose “beanspirit” as my nickname and of course i want to have the domain .com as well. Unfortunately, the domain was owned by a coffee shop. I was disappointed, but it was not a big problem. I did not really have time to maintain my website regularly or build interesting contents for my visitor. Therefore, i simply bought the .org domain. (the .net domain was not available on that time either) One year later, i came to Germany and wanted to host a new website. The .net domain was luckily free to order. I got .de domain for free as well. Hm.., everything was much better.

Few days ago i received few e-mails from a number of companies regarding the domain ownership of the domain beanspirit.com. So basically, they offered me this domain or a service to get it. The price is within the range $199 USD - $250 USD. Here are 2 of them :

Our company specializes in acquiring expired domain names to help individuals and businesses protect their brand online.

The domain name BEANSPIRIT.COM is expiring and will be available to the public very soon.

We noticed that you own BEANSPIRIT.NET and felt that you may be interested.

We can assist in trying to acquire the domain name, as there are likely many interested parties competing for it.

We do not charge upfront, and the fee if we are successful is only $199 USD.

If you are interested, please let us know by November 2 at the latest.

This one is funnier :

My name is CENSORED. I am the owner of the domain name beanspirit.com. Since you own the domain beanspirit.de, I thought you might be interested in beanspirit.com. It is listed here: beanspirit.com

As you probably know, “dot com” is the strongest brand on the Internet. When people are going to a website, they just naturally think “dot com”. So, if you tell someone to go to beanspirit.de, by the time they get around to opening that site, many will naturally
go to beanspirit.com.

You might be thinking - “Yes, but I don’t want to rebrand my site.” The good thing is that you won’t have to. Upon purchase of the domain, we provide domain forwarding and email forwarding. This means that you won’t have to rebrand anything at all, just point beanspirit.com to beanspirit.de. There is no additional charge for these services.

We have listed this domain on a number of domain sales and auction websites in addition to offering it to you directly. If interested, please call us at CENSORED or go online at beanspirit.com

To be honest, i wanted to own the domain. But of course i did not want to waste money for something that is not urgently important. Besides, I knew exactly that the ownership wouldn’t worth that much for them. So, i didn’t reply anything (wait and see strategy)

Today morning i tried to check the availability of this domain. Just for fun, i was curious to know the current status. And, bingo!, the domain was available. I logged myself to my site control panel and ordered the domain. I got the domain immediately with the NORMAL PRICE without any SERVICE COST. It seems like the service company just gave up and let the domain free. Great, it was a good decision not to reply anything. Perhaps they thought that i was not interested. Yes, finally that’s mine, all i needed is just a little patience.

Mozilla released the fourth beta version of the Firefox 3.0 browser on Monday and includes more than 900 enhancements over the previous beta. The creator of this open source browser said the new beta includes improvements to performance and memory usage, fixes for stability, and platform-specific enhancements.

Some of the enhancements include a new download manager to make locating downloads easier; a full page zoom feature that allows you to zoom in and out of pages more easily; and integration for Vista, Mac OS X, and Linux that features platform-specific icons, buttons, and other user interface elements.

The current beta of Firefox 3.0, which is expected to get its final release later this year, is available for download now at Mozilla.com. If you want to try this version, please don’t forget to backup your browser data like bookmarks. Just make sure that you can restore it back in case you regret to update. Notify that the installation path is not in Program Files/Mozilla Firefox, you can change it manually for complete update.

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I have a high speed Internet Connection, a good Computer, and a big hard drive capacity. What can i do?
I only have few frequently opened websites :

1. Youtube : watch music videos or some classic movies
2. Sederet.com : an online English-Indonesian Dictionary
3. Canoo.net : free online german language resources
4. Yahoo : for my e-mail
5. CNN : read news and (without any purpose) read the section American Votes
6. Detik : Indonesian News Portal
7. BR-online : listen to german language Radio or watch german language videos
8. E-games Forum : Indonesian O2jam Forum (just meet my friends)
9. And of course Google to use the real Internet

Although i have so many links references, i just leave them and go back to my usual links. Any idea?
(Hey!!!! Where is Facebook? or Myspace? or Friendster?)

When i was a child, i thought that my name is unique, particularly in my country, Indonesia. The similar names which are more general are Jonata, Jonathan, Yonatan, Yonathan, etc. Few years ago, i tried to buy the domain yonata.com, i was sad because my domain was not available, so i started to forget it, and decided to use my nickname as my new identity : Yone or Beanspirit.

Few days ago, a man from China contacted me via Skype. His name is MAX and he offered me the domain yonata.com. Although it is impossible that i will buy the domain, i asked him the price, and this is the information i got from him :

Price : 500,000 Euro (dedicated server, still 7 years remaining for the hosting, 200 GB of web space).

The other informations that i got from him is only the meaning of “yonata” in Japanese and Spanish. He told me the reason of selling the domain, so i decided to try helping. Just with this little announcement. The detail contact info can be found on the banner of the site.

And here are his efforts to sell the domain name, some ideas :

1. Use Skype and search for all people who have the name of the domain.

2. Use Google and search for all people who have the name or similar name or sites with similar name.

3. Send e-mail to people who have the name or similar name, we can check the availability easily. For example with Yahoo and Hotmail.

And i am reached by him twice with the first and second way. (he doesn’t know that he has contacted the same person)

So, good luck, Max!