Have you ever stumbled upon the website wow.com thinking that it would lead you to the World of Warcraft website? It´s a fair assumption since the combination of letters is most known to represent the popular MMORPG. Well if you did go there you might have noticed that´s actually not the case, but probably not for long.

Wow.com once belonged to Compuserve and was supposed to host the WOW! initiative by the company, a system that lets parents monitor their kids? online activity. However, AOL bought Compuserve, along with all the rights wow.com but eventually no one found a use for the domain.

Now TechCrunch has been informed by a source that the website has been transferred to AOL Games which in turn will utilize the domain name for its most obvious reference, the World of Warcraft. Should the source prove correct, the website will become a social network dedicated for World of Warcraft players.

The wow.com domain name has laid dormant since at least 1998, when it was acquired by AOL along with other assets of Compuserve. The domain has been coveted by a number of AOL business units over the years, though. At one point there was a discussion of it being used to house the netscape social news assets (they eventually settled on propeller.com).

If our source is correct, a decision has been made as to the long term use of wow.com. It has been transferred to the AOL Games group and is currently being turned into a, you guessed it, World of Warcraft social network.

That makes a lot of sense, given that the first thing that comes to mind for millions of people when they hear "wow" is the ubiquitous online role playing game. Apart from selling the domain to Blizzard (which owns World of Warcraft), turning it into a World of Warcraft related site is the most obvious way to leverage the random traffic it must receive from people looking for the game. Just don´t think too hard about the fact that World of Warcraft is already a social network¡­

We don´t have any details yet on the functionality of the site or when it might launch, but we´re digging. In the meantime, there are plenty of social networks surrounding World of Warcraft and other MMOGs, see Rupture, Warcraft Social Network, mmoguildsites, and Guildcafe. For related news, see our coverage of Sparter, which runs a MMOG currency exchange.

Read More: Here

News Original From: QJ

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