7 ms·

I agree with the point of 'doesn't mean credible', but the traditional TLDs of .com/.net/.org are also much better recognized as an actual TLD. If I start a ne

I agree with the point of 'doesn't mean credible', but the traditional TLDs of .com/.net/.org are also much better recognized as an actual TLD. If I start a new taco truck company and put "burrito.services" or "burrito.catering" or "burrito.ai" in a huge font on the side of the trucks, a fairly large number of people aren't going to immediately recognize that as a web site address. On the other hand, if I'm lucky enough to get the domain burrito.net , most people will recognize that as something they can type into a web browser address bar.

sidpatil 6y ago
> If I start a new taco truck company and put "burrito.services" or "burrito.catering" or "burrito.ai" in a huge font on the side of the trucks, a fairly large number of people aren't going to immediately recognize that as a web site address. Well, unless you put "http(s)://" in front of it.
- fireattack 6y ago
  Interestingly burrito.catering used to be a thing it looks: https://web.archive.org/web/20180804010349/http://burrito.catering/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180804010349/http://burrito.ca...
- walrus01 6y ago
  Certainly, though the trend for printing vehicles, business cards, letterheads, outdoor advertising signs and such seems to be to omit the "http(s)://" or "www"... Since in real world use almost nobody is actually typing the http:// http:// into the browser anymore, as might have been necessary when we were running Netscape Navigator in 1999.
  - surround 6y ago
    > As early as 1996 browsers were already inserting the http:// http:// and www. for users automatically (rendering any advertisement which still contains them truly ridiculous). https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-history-of-the-url/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-history-of-the-url/
    - walrus01 6y ago
      That, and in a typical virtualhost based http/https setup now, it's standard DNS configuration to point the A record for the 'root' of the domain (domainname.com) to the same IP address as the www.domainname.com DNS record.
    - rightbyte 6y ago
      For some reason I typed "www" for an emberessly long time.
- defaultname 6y ago
  A pretty good percentage of people are just going to remember it as burrito.com. Alternate TLDs are fine for clickable media, but fall apart in print form.
  - fatnoah 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure this is why (in the US at least) we end up with online gambling sites located at .com addresses with "free" counterparts at .net addresses. You can advertise the free .net sites because they're not gambling with money, but people typing the addresses in simply go to the .com versions.
    - defaultname 6y ago
      Fascinating! I'd never noticed this before. Normal television is dominated by those free-to-play gambling sites, and as you mentioned overwhelmingly they seem to use .net. I always wondered how they made money.
- moehm 6y ago
  Or "www", as in "www.burrito.catering".
  - hunter2_ 6y ago
    That actually strikes me as anachronistic, because it became popular to drop "www" (not only in print media, but also in the canonical FQDN) well before these sort of TLDs became available.
    - moehm 6y ago
      This is correct, though I still believe most people understand the meaning that it's a website if I prepend the "www". On the other hand, I guess most people probably aren't typing the url out anyway but googling it instead.
      - walrus01 6y ago
        Also correct, though using my example and weird new TLDs, let's say in a theoretical example I see a bus stop outdoor advertising board on the street that says: "BURRITO.CONSULTING" I'm going to think, "uhhh, is that a website? Well, I recognize .consulting as a TLD. I guess it must be. But that's weird..." but then if i see the same sign "WWW.BURRITO.CONSULTING" I'm going to think: "Well that's definitely somebody's website, but what a weird and anachronistic way of printing it, and why is it using one of those new long generic TLDs anyways..."
        deepstack 6y ago
        yeah it is a techy thing. Most people who are not techy use "WWW", we just got to go with this. Edit your web server config to handle that.
        stephenhuey 6y ago
        Exactly. There is plenty of discussion to be found online in techie circles, but in short, if you’re going to use a naked domain to host your website, at least redirect www to it.
- scythe 6y ago
  I think that's a good thing. There should not be an unmitigated explosion of TLDs. A few will pop up that appeal to lots of users, say .taco, and the .com monoculture can be split into a manageable number of TLDs. Humanity is great at this stuff. Natural language is enervated with side channels everywhere. At some point, people may converge on "what a TLD looks like" and new TLDs will often have an ineffable TLD-ness about them.
  - nine_k 6y ago
    I think the reverse is going to happen. In the search for short, expressive names more TLDs are going to proliferate, so eventually many common words will become TLDs. It will be hard to know what is a TLD, except for a few old, well-known ones, like .com, .org, .net, etc.
  - riffic 6y ago
    > There should not be an unmitigated explosion of TLDs. too late.
- CivBase 6y ago
  > Well, unless you put "http(s)://" in front of it. Go with "https://www.burrito.services/ https://www.burrito.services/" and make it blue and underlined, just to be safe. I'm kind of kidding, but I also kind of suspect the blue font and underline would probably be more immediately recognizable for many people than the HTTPS protocol prefix.
ipython 6y ago
I had a similar experience with a side project. I used an .app tld since it was available and, hey, it seemed kind of cool. Then I told my friends and they were totally confused- “your apps not on the App Store?” Ugh. Lesson learned.
- mr_cyborg 6y ago
  I own a .app domain and in naming a folder on my Mac that I lost the ability to open the folder in Finder. Cracked me up and outside of the terminal I could find no solution.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    Right click and View Content should help you out
    - mr_cyborg 6y ago
      This is good to note. I remember I was trying to hit return to rename it and that would just open it. I was probably tired because I felt so flabbergasted! It looks like you can rename from right click too. Not sure how I missed that
  - scsilver 6y ago
    Theres a mac toggle to show hidden files/folder in finder. The prefix . makes those folders hidden
    - mr_cyborg 6y ago
      Thanks for this reply - for me it was “website.app” so this wouldn’t have applied
vmception 6y ago
If your engagement strategy relies on users typing in your domain name you need to sue whatever time displaced guru faxed you their internet marketing manual
- walrus01 6y ago
  Not my point at all, rather, that a well chosen domain name that's immediately recognizable as such, and a part of the corporate identity and trademarks, is an essential part of having an Internet presence. Also ultimately your domain name and wherever its MX record points to is the start of authority for setting up official business accounts with all of the popular social media promotion channels (you sure aren't letting your social media people run the company instagram page from an account linked to their personal gmail accounts, are you?) By no means would I say that people should ignore all the other ways of driving traffic to a company's online marketing presence, via all other modern means of social media (instagram, tiktok, facebook, twitter, whatever is the new hot thing of the current year). And having a dedicated app, partnership with third party food ordering services if you're something like a burrito delivery service.
  - dkersten 6y ago
    > you sure aren't letting your social media people run the company instagram page from an account linked to their personal gmail accounts, are you? If you're running a burrito truck, there's a good chance this is exactly what's happening.
    - walrus01 6y ago
      In the theoretical example I didn't literally mean a burrito truck, but a silly example of "I'm running a business in $marketsegment and I'm going to print all my company vehicles with $companynameurlrelatedtomarketsegment". The burrito part was chosen as a placeholder much as we might use Alice, Bob, Charlie in a discussion of cryptosystems.
      - dkersten 6y ago
phreack 6y ago
How about putting a Chrome icon next to 'burrito.catering' as if it were a social network? The implications are awful but the results might be effective
- walrus01 6y ago
  I fear we are going that way. It's already become almost a default industry standard for a lot of retail customer facing things to have the trifecta of nicely rendered, equally sized icons for facebook, instagram and twitter next to their brand name.
lkuty 6y ago
I might think that your company is providing Haskell consulting services since monads are like burritos [1]. [1]: https://blog.plover.com/prog/burritos.html https://blog.plover.com/prog/burritos.html
c22 6y ago
I think most people these days may not use URLs at all. They will type whatever is written on the side of your truck into their search engine, which is also their address bar, and they will click on the first result.
- sunshineforever 6y ago
  They will probably type whatever is written with the name of the city after it
sameerds 6y ago
I think those custom TLDs will work just fine. It might confuse customers a bit, but most of them will just type "burrito.catering" in Google and miraculously reach the correct website anyway. EDIT: In case it's not obvious, the fact is that most people don't type the website address in the URL bar. They type it in the Google search bar.
- Asdrubalini 6y ago
  Most people don't even know that .catering is a domain name, so they might not recognize it as an actual website... burrito-catering.com would be much better imho
  - smichel17 6y ago
    Maybe it's time for good 'ol www to make a comeback.
  - hombre_fatal 6y ago
    Also, a weird TLD like ".catering" usually means you're trying to use a generic word in the domain name, "burrito" in this case, which makes it even harder to remember than something more unique + ".com". The effect is that people have to now remember two generic dictionary words. "burrito" and ".catering", or wait, wasn't it "tacos" and ".food" or something? And like you said, I'm sure most people don't even recognize that ".catering" is a TLD, whatever that is, and the domain name just looks like `<genericword>.<genericword>` making it all the more confusing and arbitrary. It's like having to remember where the periods went in "del.icio.us" and, if you couldn't, googling "delicious" (until it caught on) was incredibly unhelpful. Just like googling "burrito catering" doesn't necessarily take you to "https://burrito.catering https://burrito.catering". I think even a random brand name + ".com" is still preferable to most of these new TLDs.
  - LeifCarrotson 6y ago
    Even then, you've got a large SEO and trademark barrier. Can you out-rank Qdoba for the words "burrito" and "catering"? If you do, can you use your trademark recognition to fend off competitors at better-burrito-catering.com? Like Qdoba, choose something unique. The domain caterrito.com is a little overspecific, but memorable, unique, easily trademarked, and available.
s_dev 6y ago
Conveying it's website is easy though -- stick a protocol or www in front of it. Or even underline it an colour it blue! www.burrito.ai or https://burrito.ai https://burrito.ai is obviously a website to any layman. Yes -- a server admin will tell you they are all different but generally speaking it will redirect to a preferred naming convention.
- threatofrain 6y ago
  But that looks very ugly in branding for the side of a truck.
  - snicker7 6y ago
    [www.]burrito.ai
    - threatofrain 6y ago
      Or wit.ai www.wit.ai
ratww 6y ago
Another thing about new domains is that sometimes they can get caught up in spam filters. I already suspected that reliably sending an email from an .xyz domain is very difficult, but I learned the hard way that that lots of enterprise filters also block emails that contain links to any domain ending with .xyz, so we had to use something less fancy, so a longer .com was it.

sidpatil 6y ago

> If I start a new taco truck company and put "burrito.services" or "burrito.catering" or "burrito.ai" in a huge font on the side of the trucks, a fairly large number of people aren't going to immediately recognize that as a web site address. Well, unless you put "http(s)://" in front of it.

fireattack 6y ago
Interestingly burrito.catering used to be a thing it looks: https://web.archive.org/web/20180804010349/http://burrito.catering/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180804010349/http://burrito.ca...
walrus01 6y ago
Certainly, though the trend for printing vehicles, business cards, letterheads, outdoor advertising signs and such seems to be to omit the "http(s)://" or "www"... Since in real world use almost nobody is actually typing the http:// http:// into the browser anymore, as might have been necessary when we were running Netscape Navigator in 1999.
- surround 6y ago
  > As early as 1996 browsers were already inserting the http:// http:// and www. for users automatically (rendering any advertisement which still contains them truly ridiculous). https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-history-of-the-url/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-history-of-the-url/
  - walrus01 6y ago
    That, and in a typical virtualhost based http/https setup now, it's standard DNS configuration to point the A record for the 'root' of the domain (domainname.com) to the same IP address as the www.domainname.com DNS record.
  - rightbyte 6y ago
    For some reason I typed "www" for an emberessly long time.
defaultname 6y ago
A pretty good percentage of people are just going to remember it as burrito.com. Alternate TLDs are fine for clickable media, but fall apart in print form.
- fatnoah 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure this is why (in the US at least) we end up with online gambling sites located at .com addresses with "free" counterparts at .net addresses. You can advertise the free .net sites because they're not gambling with money, but people typing the addresses in simply go to the .com versions.
  - defaultname 6y ago
    Fascinating! I'd never noticed this before. Normal television is dominated by those free-to-play gambling sites, and as you mentioned overwhelmingly they seem to use .net. I always wondered how they made money.
moehm 6y ago
Or "www", as in "www.burrito.catering".
- hunter2_ 6y ago
  That actually strikes me as anachronistic, because it became popular to drop "www" (not only in print media, but also in the canonical FQDN) well before these sort of TLDs became available.
  - moehm 6y ago
    This is correct, though I still believe most people understand the meaning that it's a website if I prepend the "www". On the other hand, I guess most people probably aren't typing the url out anyway but googling it instead.
    - walrus01 6y ago
      Also correct, though using my example and weird new TLDs, let's say in a theoretical example I see a bus stop outdoor advertising board on the street that says: "BURRITO.CONSULTING" I'm going to think, "uhhh, is that a website? Well, I recognize .consulting as a TLD. I guess it must be. But that's weird..." but then if i see the same sign "WWW.BURRITO.CONSULTING" I'm going to think: "Well that's definitely somebody's website, but what a weird and anachronistic way of printing it, and why is it using one of those new long generic TLDs anyways..."
      - deepstack 6y ago
        yeah it is a techy thing. Most people who are not techy use "WWW", we just got to go with this. Edit your web server config to handle that.
        stephenhuey 6y ago
        Exactly. There is plenty of discussion to be found online in techie circles, but in short, if you’re going to use a naked domain to host your website, at least redirect www to it.
scythe 6y ago
I think that's a good thing. There should not be an unmitigated explosion of TLDs. A few will pop up that appeal to lots of users, say .taco, and the .com monoculture can be split into a manageable number of TLDs. Humanity is great at this stuff. Natural language is enervated with side channels everywhere. At some point, people may converge on "what a TLD looks like" and new TLDs will often have an ineffable TLD-ness about them.
- nine_k 6y ago
  I think the reverse is going to happen. In the search for short, expressive names more TLDs are going to proliferate, so eventually many common words will become TLDs. It will be hard to know what is a TLD, except for a few old, well-known ones, like .com, .org, .net, etc.
- riffic 6y ago
  > There should not be an unmitigated explosion of TLDs. too late.
CivBase 6y ago
> Well, unless you put "http(s)://" in front of it. Go with "https://www.burrito.services/ https://www.burrito.services/" and make it blue and underlined, just to be safe. I'm kind of kidding, but I also kind of suspect the blue font and underline would probably be more immediately recognizable for many people than the HTTPS protocol prefix.

ipython 6y ago

I had a similar experience with a side project. I used an .app tld since it was available and, hey, it seemed kind of cool. Then I told my friends and they were totally confused- “your apps not on the App Store?” Ugh. Lesson learned.

mr_cyborg 6y ago
I own a .app domain and in naming a folder on my Mac that I lost the ability to open the folder in Finder. Cracked me up and outside of the terminal I could find no solution.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  Right click and View Content should help you out
  - mr_cyborg 6y ago
    This is good to note. I remember I was trying to hit return to rename it and that would just open it. I was probably tired because I felt so flabbergasted! It looks like you can rename from right click too. Not sure how I missed that
- scsilver 6y ago
  Theres a mac toggle to show hidden files/folder in finder. The prefix . makes those folders hidden
  - mr_cyborg 6y ago
    Thanks for this reply - for me it was “website.app” so this wouldn’t have applied

vmception 6y ago

If your engagement strategy relies on users typing in your domain name you need to sue whatever time displaced guru faxed you their internet marketing manual

walrus01 6y ago
Not my point at all, rather, that a well chosen domain name that's immediately recognizable as such, and a part of the corporate identity and trademarks, is an essential part of having an Internet presence. Also ultimately your domain name and wherever its MX record points to is the start of authority for setting up official business accounts with all of the popular social media promotion channels (you sure aren't letting your social media people run the company instagram page from an account linked to their personal gmail accounts, are you?) By no means would I say that people should ignore all the other ways of driving traffic to a company's online marketing presence, via all other modern means of social media (instagram, tiktok, facebook, twitter, whatever is the new hot thing of the current year). And having a dedicated app, partnership with third party food ordering services if you're something like a burrito delivery service.
- dkersten 6y ago
  > you sure aren't letting your social media people run the company instagram page from an account linked to their personal gmail accounts, are you? If you're running a burrito truck, there's a good chance this is exactly what's happening.
  - walrus01 6y ago
    In the theoretical example I didn't literally mean a burrito truck, but a silly example of "I'm running a business in $marketsegment and I'm going to print all my company vehicles with $companynameurlrelatedtomarketsegment". The burrito part was chosen as a placeholder much as we might use Alice, Bob, Charlie in a discussion of cryptosystems.
    - dkersten 6y ago

phreack 6y ago

How about putting a Chrome icon next to 'burrito.catering' as if it were a social network? The implications are awful but the results might be effective

walrus01 6y ago
I fear we are going that way. It's already become almost a default industry standard for a lot of retail customer facing things to have the trifecta of nicely rendered, equally sized icons for facebook, instagram and twitter next to their brand name.

lkuty 6y ago

I might think that your company is providing Haskell consulting services since monads are like burritos [1]. [1]: https://blog.plover.com/prog/burritos.html https://blog.plover.com/prog/burritos.html

c22 6y ago

I think most people these days may not use URLs at all. They will type whatever is written on the side of your truck into their search engine, which is also their address bar, and they will click on the first result.

sunshineforever 6y ago
They will probably type whatever is written with the name of the city after it

sameerds 6y ago

I think those custom TLDs will work just fine. It might confuse customers a bit, but most of them will just type "burrito.catering" in Google and miraculously reach the correct website anyway. EDIT: In case it's not obvious, the fact is that most people don't type the website address in the URL bar. They type it in the Google search bar.

Asdrubalini 6y ago
Most people don't even know that .catering is a domain name, so they might not recognize it as an actual website... burrito-catering.com would be much better imho
- smichel17 6y ago
  Maybe it's time for good 'ol www to make a comeback.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Also, a weird TLD like ".catering" usually means you're trying to use a generic word in the domain name, "burrito" in this case, which makes it even harder to remember than something more unique + ".com". The effect is that people have to now remember two generic dictionary words. "burrito" and ".catering", or wait, wasn't it "tacos" and ".food" or something? And like you said, I'm sure most people don't even recognize that ".catering" is a TLD, whatever that is, and the domain name just looks like `<genericword>.<genericword>` making it all the more confusing and arbitrary. It's like having to remember where the periods went in "del.icio.us" and, if you couldn't, googling "delicious" (until it caught on) was incredibly unhelpful. Just like googling "burrito catering" doesn't necessarily take you to "https://burrito.catering https://burrito.catering". I think even a random brand name + ".com" is still preferable to most of these new TLDs.
- LeifCarrotson 6y ago
  Even then, you've got a large SEO and trademark barrier. Can you out-rank Qdoba for the words "burrito" and "catering"? If you do, can you use your trademark recognition to fend off competitors at better-burrito-catering.com? Like Qdoba, choose something unique. The domain caterrito.com is a little overspecific, but memorable, unique, easily trademarked, and available.

s_dev 6y ago

Conveying it's website is easy though -- stick a protocol or www in front of it. Or even underline it an colour it blue! www.burrito.ai or https://burrito.ai https://burrito.ai is obviously a website to any layman. Yes -- a server admin will tell you they are all different but generally speaking it will redirect to a preferred naming convention.

threatofrain 6y ago
But that looks very ugly in branding for the side of a truck.
- snicker7 6y ago
  [www.]burrito.ai
  - threatofrain 6y ago
    Or wit.ai www.wit.ai

ratww 6y ago

Another thing about new domains is that sometimes they can get caught up in spam filters. I already suspected that reliably sending an email from an .xyz domain is very difficult, but I learned the hard way that that lots of enterprise filters also block emails that contain links to any domain ending with .xyz, so we had to use something less fancy, so a longer .com was it.