Twitter Goes After Twittersearch.com

Twitter late last week filed a UDRP complaint, notably its first ever since the company was founded, in an effort to obtain ownership over the (currently parked) domain name twittersearch.com – as you can see here.

Obviously, Twitter is right to do this, since the domain is likely to cause some confusion, although we should note Twitter hasn’t managed to secure a trademark for the term ‘twitter’ in the United States so far, despite multiple attempts.

Update: my bad, they haven’t had any success in getting a trademark on the word ‘tweet’, but they do own the ‘twitter’ trademark.

Twitter of course has a popular search product that bears the obvious name Twitter Search, so I’d do the exact same thing if I were them.

That said, they took their sweet time to make the move – twittersearch.com was first registered back in March 2007.

A quick WHOIS search reveals that the owner of the contested domain name has opted to hide his or her identity, and the domain name is currently inactive, leading to a placeholder page riddled with ads.

Next up, twitter-search.com?

Update 2: DomainNameWire on ‘Why Twitter Singled Out TwitterSearch.com’. Also, the owner is apparently Popvox, the same company that’s behind TwitterVision.com.