Ping.fm Back Online After Domain Snafu

Want another good reason to stick with old-school .com and .net domain names instead of one of those quirky new top-level domains? Apply data center engineering logic: what happens with these newer domain extensions when something goes badly awry? It looks like Ping.fm just learned this the hard way, as a problem managing its domain name knocked the service offline for more than a day.

Ping.fm, which provides social media updating for multiple services (i.e. post simultaneously to Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook) realized at about 8 a.m. Monday that its domain was displaying a GoDaddy parking ad page. The Ping.fm team first blamed GoDaddy ("they seemingly 'screwed us'") as it used its Twitter feed to combat rumors that the service had closed. By Monday night GoDaddy was clearly trying to get the domain back online. "Actually, the office of the President of GoDaddy called me personally ensuring that they are working on this with a high priority," wrote Ping.fm CEO Sean McCullough. So how does the domain remain offline once Bob Parsons gets involved?

The .fm domain is an Internet country code domain name assigned to the Federated States of Micronesia, which sold marketing rights for the domain to BRS Media of San Francisco. Ping.fm's problem required a change at the .fm registry, as the company acknowledged in a blog post: