News Corporation is no stranger to social networking. After its acquisition of MySpace it holds a pretty potent position in the social scene. Not content with attracting users to his community Murdoch may now be shifting up a gear and going after individual family websites. According to Vallewag:
"This week News Corp. and NBC Universal announced that their online-video joint venture finally had a name, "Hulu". But before Hulu.com fell into Murdoch's hands, the website featured no videos at all -- just innocent pictures of a couple's 7-year-old daughter.
Copies of the Hulu.com website cached by the Internet Archive indicate that Posen and Lucy Hung previously owned the four-letter domain name, rare and valuable because of its brevity. (A person named Posen Hung works for Symbol Technologies in the Bay Area, according to LinkedIn.)"
Insiders suggest that may be just the start in a broader acquisition strategy. "We're trying to fly under the radar for a while by picking off less common names" indicated a source close to the deal, "We want to move on to the bigger names like Smith and Jones before Yahoo! and Microsoft realize what's going on."
That may be harder now that this week's acquisition became public. Microsoft has apparently set aside up to $5B for domain name acquisitions, while Google is planning to lure owners with "free advertising for life" for their family reunions.
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