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June 2, 1997
Typo.net Entrepreneurs Set Careless Spellers Straight
TAKING IN THE SITES / By THOMAS W. HOLCOMB Jr.
ommy if you don't learn how to spell you are not going to get anywhere. ..."
At the risk of making Mom really mad by contradicting her in public, it must be reported that poor spellers and bad typists can get somewhere, thanks to a new friend on the Internet.
If you are in the habit of typing Internet addresses and you happen to type www.micorsoft.com instead of www.microsoft.com, you will get to Microsoft's site, but it will be courtesy of typo.net.
Typo.net, a subsidiary of Nerds Inc., is run by the company's two principal operators, Robert Hoffer, its chief executive, and Timothy L. Kay, the chief scientist.
They have taken advantage of cacography in a novel way. They have registered hundreds of novelty domain names like sawbones.net, grandma.net, alarmist.com and consultation.net that allow for the sale of vanity e-mail names through their site called Identity.Net. They also registered more than 90 of the most probable misspellings of popular Web addresses afforded by the QWERTY keyboard, for processing by typo.net. The server at typo.net is programmed to pass visitors along to the probable desired address, after displaying a 15-second advertisement.
A vanity e-mail name costs $10 a year, but if you work for Microsoft, you can get an evil-empire.com alter ego free. Hoffer said he has had a few takers for the gratis identities.
The typo.net idea grew out of the brainstorming sessions that the two held to come up with new domain names for identity.net. Kay wrote an algorithm to generate the misspellings and a program to automate registering them.
Hoffer and Kay then convinced Jason Brandt, account director and senior vice president of Rapp Collins New York, an advertising agency owned by the Omnicom Group, that their service could be valuable to some of his clients. As a result, the reckless surfer who types micorsoft.com will connect to a Web page that is programmed to splash a 15-second full-screen advertisement in the browser window before referring him to Microsoft's Web site.
"We hope that we are doing both the clients and the URL a service by providing a redirect to their service," Hoffer said. "We don't believe there should be room in the minds of the consumers about where they are supposed to be going."
To that end, the typo.net intercept page will begin with a line identifying itself and stating its purpose. By the time the Web surfers have read the legend and seen the advertisement, they are ushered along to the site that Kay believes they meant to get to in the first place.
Experienced Web surfers tend to tune out banner ads on Web pages the way that television viewers tune out commercials. But when you expect to see links to software patches and downloads, sports scores or an online newspaper, (nhtimes.com is one of their holdings) and instead there is a bottle of pop or a colorful candy lozenge coming at you, you tend to take notice.
Hoffer promises not to take advantage of the mistakes of viewers for longer than the 15-second delay that he will promise his sponsors. "Typo.net is designed not to be a destination site," Hoffer said. "Our attitude about it is simple. We don't want this to become onerous for the consumer."
Kay notes that typo.net will process a "typo" in about half the time that a browser would take to inform you of your error; you will not have to decipher a cryptic DNS (domain name server) error message, or take any other corrective action to get to your destination.
While some may see typo.net as Web pirates -- ambushing the careless on the Internet -- Hoffer speaks of his service as a win-win proposition. This is a healthy stance to take considering the potential for litigation with registered names like dinsey.com, hahoo.com, amaxon.com and sprotsline.com.
"There is clearly not a domain name problem, strictly speaking," said Peter Jaszi, professor of law at the Washington College of Law at American University. "The rules that govern this are private administrative schemes, applicable only to name as a precise format. The question is whether or not it's trademark infringement."
The question is tiring to Michael Levy, the president and chief executive of Sportsline.com. "I just have to hope that any one coming to our site knows how to type," he said. "There are a lot of games; I wish they didn't take place but it's a lot of work to try and do anything about it." Typo.net holds the rights to two variations of the spelling of his popular URL, www.sportsline.com.
Others may not be as reticent.
"We deal with this domain name stuff all the time, and it comes up in different permutations and flavors," said Scott Behm, a trademark lawyer for Microsoft. While he indicated that Microsoft would not hesitate to protect its customers from "confusion," he also said the company would not necessarily turn to litigation.
John Dreyer, the vice president for corporate communications at Walt Disney Co., seemed largely unconcerned about yet another pilot fish feeding on the scraps of his company's site. "It sounds like a clever idea," he said, "and it may teach all of us to be better typists."
Still, it remains to be seen whether any company will actually consider legal action against typo.net.
"One of the things we are supposed to like in this country is imagination and free enterprise," said Pam Samuelson, a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. "It does a service to everyone; why not just have a sense of humor about it?"
TAKING IN THE SITES is published weekly, on Mondays. Click here for a list of links to other columns in the series.
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