Fusu: A Stock Exchange for Premium Domain Names

Fusu could be the biggest thing since sliced bread. Or, it could be a Sam Bowie-like flop (Google it folks). But the company is going after what could be a huge market, allowing anyone to “buy stock” and speculate in premium domain names.

Here’s the basic idea: domain name speculation has typically been an all-or-nothing game. You own a great domain name, but until someone buys it, there is no way to gain any liquidity. Essentially, you’re on the hook for whatever you paid until you can find a buyer. Further, if you’ve ever inquired about one of the tens of millions domains that speculators currently hold, you’ve probably come to realize that prices can be fairly arbitrary.

Enter Fusu, which publicly launches today and allows domain owners to sell up to 45% of their names to investors. It starts with an “Initial Domain Offering” (IDO), the equivalent to an IPO on Wall Street. Investors buy up shares, and that money goes directly to the domain owner. From there, the shares are owned by individual investors, who can then buy and sell them at an agreed on price, which in turn changes the valuation of the domain name. Once the domain owner sells the domain (gets acquired) shareholders get the acquisition price – presumably higher than the current market value that has been set by the Fusu trading community. Similar to an online brokerage account, Fusu provides tools for tracking your investments and getting quotes for domain names.

In theory, this is brilliant for a few reasons. First, domain owners can immediately get cash for their holdings. Second, rather than arbitrary domain pricing, values are set by a marketplace of buyers and sellers. Third, there is a finite amount of good dotcom names in the world, and with such scarcity, the value is likely to continue to go up over time. This gives small investors a chance to get in on the action, versus having to shell out tens of thousands (or more) for premium domain names.

In practice, Fusu has some significant challenges ahead of it. Much like any online marketplace, it will need a critical mass of buyers and sellers in order to set legitimate market values. Until it gets that critical mass, investors could essentially be stuck holding their shares indefinitely, waiting either for more buyers to come along that they can trade with, or for the domain owner to find an acquirer. That said, given the scarcity issue, it’s hard not to be bullish on the long-term prospect of domain investing (as annoying as such practices might be to people who just want a good name for a site they’re actually building!).

If it is successful, Fusu could be an enormously profitable company. They are both the investment bank and the exchange in this case, collecting 1% on the “IDO” and 1% on all transactions that take place in the after-market.

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Developer Analytics: Advanced Statistics for Facebook Applications (Invites)

Developer Analytics (dA) is a new service that provides detailed statistics for Facebook applications, competing with the likes of Adonomics and Facebook’s in-house stats program – Insights. While it includes the same basic data such as total installs, daily active users and trends over time, it takes analytics to the next level by providing demographic data on each application. We have 1,000 invites to use for Mashable readers - use the code mashable1000 when signing up to gain access to dA’s advanced stats program.

For example, in the below screenshot you can see stats for FunWall by Slide. To the left, demographic data about age and gender, while to the right, deeper analysis of the users. The “App User Overlap” is especially interesting, as you can see that FunWall users are also likely to install other Slide applications – 48% have installed Top Friends, while 20% have added My Questions.

Beyond the individual app analytics, dA maintains leaderboards for the most popular apps, developers, and ad networks. There are some definite disparities between the leaderboard on dA and that on Adonomics, much like there is with the public web traffic measurement services (Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, etc.). I would argue that this is a good thing though – having a few different independent measurement services allows us to better approximate how apps and Web site are performing.

Lastly, dA is looking to build a mini-community for Facebook developers. Each user has their own profile where you can see what apps they’ve built in addition to some basic social features such as “recent visitors” and “related developers.” The site is also compiling a list of “developer interviews” that you can read through. Overall, there is a lot of useful data on dA, especially for advertisers that want to reach specific types of Facebook users by demographics.

As for where dA is headed in the future, one of the company’s co-founders Charles Yong shared some thoughts on how - like many commentators - he thinks the CPM model for advertising is going to eventually fade away. He writes:

“Someone with the right social graph can easily result in tens of thousands of installs, whereas a person with the wrong social graph may fetch only a few extra installs beyond their own. Hence, we believe there may be a paradigm shift in the near future as to how credit is distributed in link exchange and ultimately, advertising. As the platform matures, advertisers will slowly move from the traditional “clickthrough” strategy towards the more organic “viral referral” strategy. Hence, an advertiser should pay more for a referral by a user with 1000 friends, than a user with 3. We hope to be able to measure those values in a meaningful and accurate way.”

On a side note, anecdotally it appears usage of most of the top applications is leveling off or headed downward from clicking through many of the listings on dA’s leaderboard. Along those lines, the service should be a nice tool to use for a follow-up on how Facebook apps are performing in the near future

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Amazon Offers Explanation For S3 Outage

In a highly unusual occurrence for Amazon, the company’s S3 storage service had an outage yesterday. It left many people scratching their heads. Late yesterday evening, the corporation has decided to take the open explanation path and let the public know what happened behind the scenes.

Nicholas Carr of Rough Type passed along the explanation that Amazon gave to everyone as to what caused this problem. It seems that at approximately 3:30 AM PST on the 15th, a user started sending a high volume of authentication requests through to one of the S3 data centers. Amazon saw this happening, but did not move more capacity through at that time. And when another customer slammed them with requests less than half an hour later, the downfall of S3 commenced. The authentication service was pushed over its maximum level, and it took them time to move more capacity into the right areas. Essentially they ended up with a denial of service attack.

Whether intentional or not, we don’t know. Considering the size of some S3 customers, one has to wonder how two customers could have suddenly needed to send that many requests through to the authentication server. (According to a supposedly leaked internal email that Mr. Carr shows on his blog, at least one Amazon executive wonders the same thing.)

As the S3 storage service is used by services as large as Twitter, this could have had some fairly serious ramifications if it had happened in the middle of the day.

While the questions are sure to linger for some time, Amazon is already taking steps to ensure things like this can not happen again. They are taking steps to up their capacity, build a service health dashboard for customers and add more defenses around the authentication systems.

It is refreshing to see a company being so forthright with their explanations and pointing out their systemic failings. What happened here should have been avoidable. Considering how they tout their service to be greatly scalable with superb uptime, they will have to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.

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