TechCrunch reported today that Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, has launched a mobile payment service called Square. While the actual product/service looks pretty cool, I am surprised that someone with the capital resources such as Dorsey would launch a new brand on a domain name that is different from the actual brand.

The big problem for Square is that they are using the domain name SquareUp.com for their website. This really defies logic to me for a couple of big reasons.

First and most obviously because it’s a mobile payment platform, and people will want to visit the website to learn about the company that will have access to credit card and payment info, and the web address is not intuitive. Many people will visit Square.com to learn about Square, Inc., and they won’t find the information they desire.

Secondly, Square.com is owned by a Japanese company, and the domain name doesn’t resolve. It’s one thing if it resolves to another company’s website, where the visitor can figure out that he needs to look elsewhere. It’s another thing if the domain doesn’t resolve and looks like the company has technical problems. There is nothing on Square.com that would tell a visitor anything but the website isn’t working.

The standalone name “Square” really has no meaning as a mobile payment service. It’s not like the brand actually means something to the product/service, where by sacrificing the brand name, part of the company’s identity would be lost. For example, the Paypal brand has everything to do with a payment service – they’re the “pay pal.”  Square does not have this identity. “Square Up” could be a better brand identity, since people use the term “square up” or “square away” when they need to settle a tab.

This doesn’t seem like a smart branding move for a mobile company – especially one with a $40,000,000 valuation.

I was going through my spam email message folder this morning, when I found an email from a colleague asking for an opinion on Twitter user names. I don’t know why it got marked as spam, but it was in there. As you may or may not be aware, Google monetizes all Gmail emails with sponsored links, and I found one that was very interesting when reading this Twitter-related email.

As you can see in the image above, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg is encouraging people to follow his account on Twitter. Not only was Gmail detecting my location via IP address (New York City), but it could also tell that the email was related to Twitter, and it placed a targeted advertisement on top of the spam email.

Over the past several months, my wife an I have received a significant amount of mail from Bloomberg, who is looking to become elected for his third term. He has also taken to the airwaves, bought space in print media, and now is advertising on Adwords to encourage people to follow him on Twitter.

Although I find political advertising to be quite annoying, I think it’s cool to see this integrated marketing campaign.

A few weeks ago, I received a message on Facebook from a domain industry friend with an urgent message. Apparently I had befriended a person who was posting Anti-Semitic links on his Facebook page, and my friend wanted to know if I knew the guy and/or if I had seen the links he was posting. The answer to both questions was, “no.”

I receive a number of Facebook “friend” requests each week. I typically look to see if we have friends in common, and if so, I approve the request without anything further. I figured, if you’re a friend of a friend, you can be a friend of mine. I had around 500 Facebook friends, and when I went through the list a few days ago, there were many names I didn’t recognize, let alone consider a personal friend.

I thought about it for a few minutes and realized that I generally use Facebook to keep up with my friends. I was a late adopter and didn’t really use it until a year ago, (although I established my account in grad school), but it has allowed me to keep up with high school friends, college friends, and other random friends I’ve made over the years. Of course, there were also many domain industry friends, too. However, I really don’t do any business or talk about business on Facebook to spare my friends from seeing business updates in their news feeds.

Twitter, on the other hand, is a very public outlet for me to share information. A majority of my posts are business-related, and I don’t post much in the way of personal information. I am not against posting personal things, but my primary Twitter objective is business and marketing. I have a lot of followers, and I follow a whole lot of interesting people. The more information I can get from Twitter, the better.

That said, I’ve decided to draw the line and make Facebook more of a personal spot, only accepting friends and colleagues I know on a personal level. I feel that I share much of what I am doing on my blog anyway, but I wanted to draw the line, and I think Facebook is the place to do it.

If we are no longer connected on Facebook, it’s nothing personal. Connect with me on Twitter instead

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about Best Buy’s television commercials advertising their Twelpforce, a group of Best Buy’s  technology experts who offer technical advice and support via Twitter. The most interesting thing about these commercials was that they weren’t directing visitors to their website, something which they control. Instead, they were directing people to the Twelpforce Twitter page, which is owned by Twitter.

While I don’t think there are going to be problems with Twitter, I just don’t think it’s a smart move to build the Twitter traffic rather than traffic to the main Best Buy site. They could conceivably redirect traffic from BestBuy.com/twelpforce to the Twitter page if they wanted to do so, allowing them to control the traffic and analytics rather than a third party.

Recently, I’ve been seeing commercials from TGI Fridays, encouraging people to go to a Facebook page they set up, Facebook.com/fanwoody. The commercial says that if 500,000 become Woody’s Fan, all will receive a coupon for a free burger at a TGI Fridays restaurant. The TGIF fan page has over 497,000 fans right now, and at the rate it seems to be going, they will hit the half a million mark in the next couple of hours.

Like Best Buy is doing with Twitter, TGI Fridays is driving traffic to Facebook rather than their home page. I still don’t understand or like the logic behind building another company’s brand.

I monitor a bunch of keywords and domain names on my Cotweet account, one of the Twitter applications I use on a regular basis. A couple of days ago, I saw that another Twitter user had mentioned one of my domain names with a ccTLD extension, and because her post was in a different language, I didn’t really understand what she was saying at first.

Instead of translating the Tweet, I decided to type in the domain name she mentioned, and I was surprised to see a fully developed cosmetics company operating on the ccTLD. I am not too concerned about them accusing me of using their brand because my domain name is a fully developed business, they are in another company, and I am not even operating in the same industry.

However, I did some additional research to make sure that my usage started before theirs and that they don’t have any trademarks or pending marks for the term in the US.  While this might be unnecessary, I am just doing my due diligence to proactively see what could lie ahead. With the ease of filing a UDRP, I want to make sure I am prepared just in case.

If you own and operate a business on a domain name where other companies are operating on different extensions, you, too should do your due diligence. Ignorance is never a valid defense!