March 27, 2010 -- Internet startup FourSquare.com had an interesting fiasco on their hands yesterday – a Godaddy.com parked page on their website. The location based social networking site forgot to renew its domain name.

Apparently, someone at the company either didn’t heed the renewal notices, or didn’t keep a credit card on file, and when the domain expired on March 25^th, registrar Godaddy.com implemented their standard parked page– whoops.

We see this happen all of the time in the domain name industry, especially with start-ups. It’s a common scenario, have an idea, receive funding, buy a domain name, start building your business and forget about the details like yearly registration – after all, with a reported $10 million in new funding, who has time to look at email renewal notices or keep credit cards up to date? Luckily for FourSquare.com there is a grace period to renew domains before they become available to the public. Registrars like Godaddy.com give 30 days before the domain goes into a redemption status, and 60-90 days before they go public.

Whatever the reason for the lapse in renewal, the company should be good for the next decade. They purchased a 10 year registration and that’s what we call forward thinking.