Bido.com announced some changes to their auction system. Sahar posted the changes to his blog Conceptualist.com yesterday.

List of changes:

1. You can comment on expert commentaries
2. You can submit up to 100 names for consideration compared to the 10 allowed before
3. You can submit adult domains
4. Experts can vote on submitted domains
5. Starting Monday there will be multiple auctions running per day (Bido does not run weekend auctions)
6. Each listed item has its own item chat as well as a global chat for all to participate.

Here is a screen shot of the submitted names page that Bido experts will be allowed to select from. As of right now there are about 280 names to vote on. This number will increase substantially very soon. The current setup is to click through the pages and select the ones you like. I talked to Sahar today and they are looking to improve this setup. With adding that many more names to vote from, there is a need for a system with categories. We will see how this progresses. I know for myself, I will not have the time to sort through thousands of names to vote on domain names.

I read Andrew’s article of DomainNameWire.com about the changes and liked what he said about comments “Previously, you could only give a ‘thumbs up’ to an expert commentary about a domain name. Now you can leave a full comment, either reaffirming or disagreeing with the expert’s analysis. This will make the comments more fluid, and many of these experts will learn what it’s like to be a blogger”. I asked Sahar about this and there will be no moderation for these comments. I take that back, he said as long as they are professional they can be negative or positive.

In talks with Sahar today he hinted of some additional changes next month. He would not give me any details but to say the following, “We have another big release coming next month, it’s already built but we didn’t want to overwhelm the market with new stuff” and “Soon we will have more than a domain channel”. Now I can’t speak for Bido, but I’m going to assume they will allow the sale of fully developed sites and services, guess we’ll have to wait and see.

In the mean time if you’d like to submit your domain name for auction do so here.