Mark Anders' Blog

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June 27, 2006

Introducing Flex.org

One of the things a number of us on the Flex team wanted to do was to create a unique Flex destination on the web. And so I'm please to say that with the release of Flex 2, we've also launched www.flex.org. You should think of it as a work in progress, but one that we hope will add real value to the Flex community over time. So please check it out!

I personally am really excited about this. Back when I ran the ASP.NET team at Microsoft, we wanted to create a top level destination on the web for a technology that we were really proud of. And so we obtained at considerable cost the asp.net domain. That site was really important in getting the message out and so I hoped that we could do something similar for Flex. It is my sincere hope that flex.org will help Flex become widely successful by highlighting the growing community and resources available. The story of how we obtained such a cool domain name is this.

At the beginning of the year, I became somewhat obsessed with wanting Flex, a technology that I'm really passionate about, to have its own top level domain. I didn't want it to be just some stuff on the Adobe web site, but a real destination that people might naturally check out when they heard about Flex, especially the free Flex SDK. And so I started looking into domain names.

Of course, one of the things I quickly discovered is that obtaining a 4 letter domain name, especially one that is a cool, not made up word isn't easy. It seemed that all the flex domains were taken. However, as I pinged them, I found that flex.org was not an active web site. And when I did a whois, I found that though it had been first registered back in the mid-90's, it was due for expiration at the end of February.

As we got close to March, I checked back and found that the expiration date had been extended! I was really bummed. However, when I looked into it a bit further, I found that it had been assigned to a company called Snapnames and that they would auction it off on April 2nd. And so I put in an opening bid of something like $50.

The actual auction took place over 3 days, and from the start, I had the winning bid. So when day 3 rolled around, and I still had the winning bid at only $73, I was feeling pretty cocky. Of course, my bid stayed "winning" up to the point where there was about 60 minutes left and that's when the fun started. It was then that someone, after being completely inactive over the past 3 days, had the gall to start bidding against me. And I watched with horror as the price rose, first pass $100, then past $200, until it was almost $300! Luckily, as we came to within 60 seconds left in the bidding, my bid was still winning and still way under my maximum bid. So I was confident that flex.org would soon be mine! It was then that the unthinkable happened. Time moved backwards!

The first time it happened, I couldn't believe it. There I am, frantically refreshing my browser, watching the seconds tick down, when suddenly, there's 5 minutes left! What's going on? Is this some type of joke? Is it a scam? I was freaking out! And the price kept going up!

The second time it happened, I fired up another browser and went looking through the snapnames site to find out what could possibly be happening. It was then that I found a clause somewhere that said something to the effect that if bidding was still active within 2 minutes or so of the end, that time would be extended to make things "fair". To me, it seemed like saying "if we're in the finals of the World Cup with 10 seconds left and one team is ahead by a goal, but the other team still seems to l have some energy left, we'll add another 5 minutes to the clock." How can that possibly be fair? When time runs out, isn't someone supposed to win and the others lose?

Well, this went on and on for about 40 minutes and it was emotionally draining. Every few seconds, my "winning" bid, would increase while I pounded on the refresh button and my mind whirred. As we neared $1,000, I couldn't help but think about how much asp.net cost. And though I really can't say how much, it is probably safe to say that it was in the neighborhood of one to two orders of magnitude more than I could charge on my credit card! Luckily for me, as we neared $1,200, my rival started to show signs of fatigue, as the time between bids slowed. They finally gave up at $1,250. And so for $1,253, flex.org was mine, or rather Adobe's!

So please check it out and most importantly check out all of the resources it references. I hope you enjoy it!

Posted by Mark Anders at June 27, 2006 10:54 PM

Comments

Posted by: Alexandru COSTIN at June 28, 2006 01:26 AM

Posted by: Graeme Harker at June 28, 2006 01:50 AM

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