Protecting one’s brand is pretty much standard practice for large online properties like Facebook. As a result, the social network giant now owns hundreds of domain names, of which only a few are actually used. The rest have been taken over from others for “safekeeping.”

We find it rather amusing that Facebook itself now owns domain names such as:

• IHateTheFacebookLikeButton.com
• LikeButtonSucks.com
• LikeSucks.com
• FacebookCreditsSuck.org
• FBCreditsSuck.org
• IHateFacebookCredits.com

Most of these have plenty of variations for .org, .net, .biz, etc.

There is a small chance that someone at Facebook showed remarkable foresight and registered these domain names for preventive purposes, but we highly doubt that.

We assume that these are mostly domain names that other people have registered first, perhaps even run websites on, which have then been taken over by Facebook via a domain dispute (which they will essentially always win).

In general, it’s just not a good idea to register a domain name with a brand name in it. Just don’t do it.

Other domain names owned by Facebook

Although it’s funny that Facebook owns a bunch of anti-Facebook domain names, these just make up a small portion of the hundreds of domain names it owns. Others include:

• Typos like Faceobok.com and a ton of other variations. So-called typosquatting is a practice where someone registers common typos of a domain name to benefit from the traffic they get when people enter an incorrectly spelled website address. For a site with as much traffic as Facebook, even a tiny portion would be significant.
• Brand intrusions of various kinds, mostly domain names with Facebook + something else. These make up the largest chunk of domain names owned by Facebook. For example, they include attempts by someone to cash in on FacebookPorn.com, FacebookSex.com and SexyFacebook.info. And pardon the pun, but they were probably met by someone from FacebookForLawyers.com, another domain name now owned by Facebook. Gaining ownership of these kinds of domain names is a constant struggle for Facebook.

While we’re on the subject of domain names, here’s a quick tip: Don’t forget that Facebook also owns FB.com and has redirected it to Facebook.com, if you want to save yourself some typing.

And in case you wondered, yes, Facebook has held on to the original TheFacebook.com.

Data source: DomainTools name server report.

Perceptions matter, and the perception of Nokia in the news, on the web, and in the minds of many, is that things aren’t going that well. Even in the Pingdom office, we hear “Nokia is doomed,” but do the numbers support this belief?

Looking at the statistics, Symbian leads the mobile operating system race with just over 30% of web browsing traffic. That’s down slightly from late last year, when we noted that Symbian finished 2011 as the top mobile operating system, with almost 34% of the mobile OS market.

What is even more interesting, however, is that Nokia is also ahead when we look at figures for all the mobile handset vendors. In fact, Nokia is way ahead of Apple, and Android lags far behind.

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Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, we talk mainly about Distributed Denial of Service attacks. Some fresh research shows an increase in smaller, more targeted DDoS attacks, and hacker group Anonymous has vowed to take down the Internet by launching a DDoS attack on the 13 root DNS servers.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on OpenStack.

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By some measures, more than 7 billion people now inhabit the world, and more than a third of us are on the Internet. But how many are added each day, each week, or each minute? We think we have a pretty good idea.

Read on for some pretty amazing numbers.

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Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, we can finally talk about Saleh’s Carbon for Windows Phone app being available in Windows Marketplace. We also talk to Rich Brueckner of InsideHPC.com about the world of supercomputers.

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