Bido off to a good start

Bido - the premier site for live domain auctions - kicked off its domain per day auction service on June 18th, 2008. Their first auction was completed with a winning bid of $911 for discountimages.com.

Cool features

Bido has some nice features that you might not find at other auction sites.

1. The RSS feed on live bids is nice. You can also use the RSS feed to view completed bids as well at future bids. Here’s some samples of how to do it:

Link for completed auction discountimages.com
Link for today’s live auction of goldauction.com
Link for the future auction of cerealbox.com which starts on June 25th
[I don't know why Sahar keeps saying on his blog that this feature will be available next week, you can see completed, live and future auctions right now by using the links shown above]

2. The voting for/against expert opinion is handy. You can get some feedback from others on what they think of the “experts”. Unfortunately, this feature can be gamed, so be careful how much trust you put in it !

3. The scorecard is another handy feature. For those bidders not familiar with the basics of checking backlinks, ranks, pages in the search engines etc, the scorecard give them a nice heads up on one page.

4. Bido is running the lighttp web server and debian linux on the backend. This makes it a fast and secure platform. I’m a big debian fan. Good job guys.

Areas for improvement

Like all new launches, there are some areas of improvement for Bido. Unfortunately, some of them are pretty glaring and need to be fixed asap by the Bido team.

1. New user registration is a cake walk. It is a simple as filling out a 2 page form with no email validation. Once you finish the form, you’re signed up, logged in and you can start bidding. And you can also rate those expert opinions as well. So what is the problem you say? Well, since Bido does not send an email confirmation and get you to verify your email address, you can create 10 or 10,000 fake accounts and make a real mess of the bidding. People will abuse this lack of validation for spam, identity faking, fake votes, fake bids etc.

2. Sign up for the Bido newsletter — see 1. above. Go ahead, sign up the President, your dog etc they can all subscribe without opt-in confirmation of any kind. Yikes!

3. I can’t see any way to retract a bid. Perhaps that might be a feature to consider?

4. Bido is not html/xhtml compliant. I know, many of you will say, “ah who cares”, but I believe the folks behind Bido are professionals and would care about fixing the W3C validator errors - there are 500+ of them.

5. I have a pretty extensive background in web hosting and distributed computing. I like that the Bido team is using diverse dns, which would make it pretty hard to do a DNS DoS attack on them, which is a very popular attack these days. But they would also be served well if they used multiple A records and had a hot backup site in place. Right now they have their eggs all in one basket with theplanet. If theplanet goes down in the middle of an auction, Bido goes down too.

Final thoughts

One auction per day is nice. I know that I have trouble keeping track of auctions with 500 domains, and most of them are useless domains anyways. The expert opinions with ratings and the scorecard gives the bidder a very handy overview.

For the long term, I hope the Bido team uses some distributed hosting and puts a backup hot site in place at another data center.

But in the end, if the registration/validation issues are not addressed, I do not think anyone will take Bido auctions seriously due to the abuse possibilities.

And I am not sure yet if I like the auction extension by 5 minutes feature or not. That threw me for a loop the first time I saw it. I thought the AJAX on the site was playing games with my Firefox.