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Most of the time, www.TLD goes somewhere, but instructing non-technical users to visit "www.example" would likely confuse them much more than owning "example.co
by seanp2k2 10y ago
Most of the time, www.TLD goes somewhere, but instructing non-technical users to visit "www.example" would likely confuse them much more than owning "example.com" with a CNAME set up for "www.example.com" as well. gTLDs are, IMO, a stupid cash grab which may or may not harm domain squatters.
- bduerst 10y agoWell, if you look at the history of URL use in the public offline realm, it keeps getting shorter. URLs started as "http://www.example.com" http://www.example.com" in the late 90's, and then went to "www.example.com", and are now mostly "example.com". For major trademarks, it could be the natural progression to just go to "example". Or not - internet use is weirdly unpredictable.
- pfranz 10y agoMy guess is that it'll stick to "example.com" unless we switch to a proprietary service (like Facebook or Twitter). A nice thing about "example.com" is that it gives you enough context to know it's a web address and you type it in your browser. Thinking back to AOL, they always had to say "AOL Keyword: Example" or "Keyword: Example" to give you enough context. Years ago maybe doing something like having it blue and underlined might have caught on and let you just use the word? One way it could be shorter and keep context is if we hijacked a special character like Twitter does #example or @twitter--but I can't imagine standards bodies getting on board with using a special character (or trying to get people to adopt it as a replacement for web URLs).
- pfranz 10y agoOne way I just thought of that wouldn't sacrifice a special character would be to come up with some symbol that means URL and have web browsers use that next to their URL bar. Could be an emoji-like symbol--maybe something similar to the html5 shield? But luck getting everyone on board with that.