Not a Smart Start for Yahoo’s Kickstart

Yahoo recently announced the launch of Kickstart, a new social networking site.  I wanted to check it out, so I navigated to Kickstart.com, and I found a Network Solutions “Coming Soon” landing page.  Curious, I did a Whois search for Kickstart.com, and I learned that Yahoo doesn’t own this name.  It’s owned by a company called Toe-Food Chocolates, and has been owned by them since at least February of 2003.  Yahoo’s Kickstart website is actually located at kickstart.yahoo.com.  

Although this is in line with Yahoo’s other brands (http://finance.yahoo.com as an example), I think this is very shortsighted.  Perhaps Yahoo is looking in to acquiring this great generic name, but wouldn’t it have made more sense to acquire the name before launching the brand?  I can’t even imagine the amount of traffic that has been lost in the last few days. It would probably be better if Kickstart.com was a developed website so visitors would know to look elsewhere. Because of the landing page that is currently on the website, visitors may just assume the site hasn’t launched yet.

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