I am new to domaining and I decided to try to pick up a few domains manually when they expired. These domains weren't important to me otherwise I'd use multiple services like snapnames, pool, club drop. I just wanted to see what happened. I waited until 10:45am PST which is when domain names started to drop. Seven minutes later the first domain (of three) I was after became available. I added it to my cart on godaddy and then picked up the second of three domains. The other never showed as available. I went through checkout on godaddy but the names didn't confirm. Someone else had actually grabbed them. Perhaps for tasting. All three domains were PR 0. The two I saw available were 1 year old. The one which I never saw available was 4 years old. The point of this exercise for me was to learn about the dropping process experimenting with domains I didn't care about. I learnt an important lesson - registrars (or at least godaddy) don't try to reserve a name until check out. That is too late to get domains of value during the drop. I'm not sure if registrars which allow tasting grab domains more quickly but I suspect not. My conclusion is that manual collection is pretty much dead. The domains I tried to register are probably going to be dropped after tasting. So I might have a chance to collect them later. But they could end up being tasted several times.