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X.com is Twitter, but what are [a-z].com?
- mariorojas 3y agointeresting... I thought all the available one-letter .com domains cost hundreds of millions of dollars
- DarkNova6 3y agoI was hoping that b.org would be a Star Trek fansite.
- Biganon 3y agoAnd that k.org would redirect to the website of a brand that makes musical instruments or something
- jadbox 3y agoor k.org for KDE
- qingcharles 3y agoLOL. I should have tried to get it. I spent a significant amount of time from like 93-96 trying to persuade NSF/NS to let me register b.com and e.com and came pretty close at one point. I should have thought about b.org! I want b.com because "Be dotcom!" sounded cool.
- henpa 3y agoI remember around 1999 when I used to work for a big ISP and I ran a simple perl script that would "nslookup" all combination of 3 letters domains. It generated a huge list of available domains, but none that called my attention because all the good ones (not just random letters) seemed to be already registered. I would never thought that all those random 3 letter domains would sell for so much money many years later! :-)
- tjpnz 3y agoThey're people's initials.
- kristopolous 3y agoBeing an obdurate domain squatter would have been a successful strategy. All the things I thought would have been too stupid to work seems to have been very profitable
- sublinear 3y agoCalling a strategy "too stupid to work" is an implicit assumption of what the rest of the world wants. Someone else made a comparison to phone numbers which turned out to be accurate. Simple sells.
- BitwiseFool 3y agoI prefer the term "Domain Scalper". As it so happens, domain squatting is a legal term and it refers to buying the domain of a registered trademark just to sell it to the owner of the trademark. It doesn't even have a good resolution rate either.
- Suppafly 3y agoI'm missed out on a bunch of profitable tech booms just by a combination of being lazy and by feeling that things like domain scalping are somewhat inherently immoral.
- nucleative 3y ago>All the things I thought would have been too stupid to work seems to have been very profitable Isn't that the truth. The amount of stupid ideas that have turned out to be wildly successful.
- 1123581321 3y agoIf it's any consolation, it was only profitable because not enough people thought to squat on them so enough of them were turned into sites that made the web interesting enough to become massively popular. I tell myself such things, anyway. :)
- robin_reala 3y agoNissan used to own z.com. As a side note, they don’t actually own nissan.com, more info at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_v._Nissan_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_v._Nissan_Comput...
- sumedh 3y agoIn July 2020, Uzi Nissan died of complications from COVID-19 Wasnt expecting that :( Looks like nissan.com site is dead too, this is how it looked in 2020 https://web.archive.org/web/20200608045052/https://nissan.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200608045052/https://nissan.co...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mrweasel 3y agoOne letter domains has the same issue as many of the gTLDs, they aren't particularly useful in terms of brand recognition. X.com is pretty stupid as well, you can't meaningfully use it as a brand. Take bob.builders, it's a perfectly valid domain, but if you see it on the back of a van, even if it's www.bob.builders, it's not recognizably as a website. www.b.com has the exact same problem, even x.com / www.x.com is just weird and looks like a mistake. The one letter domains have the added issue that you have no association that might indicate where the domain will take you.
- eli 3y agoPeople just google “bob builder” anyway. Domain doesn’t matter so much.
- mikehollinger 3y ago> People just google “bob builder” anyway. Today they do. When a domain was $200 to register in the 90’s, people treated URLs like phone numbers were also treated at the time - to be written down, memorized and then typed precisely in (with slashes!) to find whatever Bob the builder was offering. It’s odd to me tbh that phone numbers were solved with contact lists and address books, along with the occasional “new phone, who dis?”
- delta_p_delta_x 3y ago> When a domain was $200 to register in the 90’s people treated URLs like phone numbers were also treated at the time - to be written down, memorized and then typed precisely in (with slashes!) to find whatever Bob the builder was offering This was the case well into the 2000s, if I recall correctly, and even into the mid-late 2010s, when URL shorteners proliferated to manage the complicated URLs generated by Google Forms etc.
- blowski 3y ago> It’s odd to me tbh that phone numbers were solved with contact lists and address books What's odd about that? I didn't really understand your comment.
- SanjayMehta 3y agof.org’s terms of service are worth a read. https://f.org/?page=rv https://f.org/?page=rv
- yial 3y agoIdentical to https://g.org/?page=rv https://g.org/?page=rv Coincidence ?
- calderknight 3y agonot coincidence, one is "in good we trust", the other one is "in code we trust"
- Melatonic 3y agoNow I'm really curious. The terms make it sound like there's a social media component once you create an account
- bruce343434 3y agoTangent but > This seems weird as the domain was sold in 2014 for 6.8M USD, which would be around 8.9M USD today taking inflation into account. Caught my attention, 30% inflation in just 9 years...
- karmakaze 3y agoThat's less than 3%/year which seems not so bad considering how so many things were up the past few years.
- voxadam 3y agoConsidering that the Fed targets 2%/yr that sounds nearly reasonable.
- runamuck 3y agoNot so bad!?! If my house value plummeted 30% in nine years that would make me furious.
- bookmark1231 3y agoThe “real” value of goods doesn’t change just because the value of currency changes. You’d be much more upset at 30% deflation, which is why there are inflation targets.
- bruce343434 3y agoOnly if your own investments and income went up proportionally.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- quenix 3y agoWow, http://g.org http://g.org is weird. Wonder what the story behind it is.
- cubefox 3y agoI wonder what's behind that login screen.
- Grimburger 3y agoOf course the Illuminati are using godaddy as a registrar, I'm not even surprised.
- lygaret 3y agoThey're a portfolio partner; there's some useful synergies there.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- prox 3y agoLooks like the regular symbols of a Masonic Lodge [1] so probably part of Free Masonry. I did work once for an affiliated organization and it was full of symbols and stuff like what you see there. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonic_lodge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonic_lodge
- yvely 3y agoOther than the login, there's a quite interesting Code of Conduct. Name of company/org is just missing and it describes things like using electronic time cards and equal employment opportunity, which is kind of funny if it actually is freemasonry related (I think they would be one sex only)
- ffsoftboiled 3y agoMost grand lodges of states employ both men and women even if the organization is men only.
- thih9 3y agoI don’t like the letter “x” being used as a company name, I find it impractical and confusing. I’d like to call it something different, and since many people say “x/twitter”, I guess others have similar thoughts. I’m not unhappy that there are few other single letter domains, especially if they were to be claimed by corporations.
- kibwen 3y agoYou can just call it Twitter, in the same way that everyone just says Facebook rather than Meta and Google rather than Alphabet.
- thih9 3y agoThis is different though - Facebook wasn’t rebranded to Meta, Facebook is still the official name for Meta’s product. Meanwhile most of Twitter’s logos and other branding have been replaced.
- kibwen 3y agoAnd yet the vast majority of humanity, who do not use Twitter and who, at best, merely know about it in passing, are not in a position to observe this rebrand and would be confused by even calling it "Twitter/X", as though that's some sort of new product under the Twitter brand. Calling it Twitter just reduces confusion.
- EarthLaunch 3y agoI'm just disappointed that people go along with takeovers of useful words: x, meta, alphabet. If one was renamed "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" would people still go along with it? What's the limit?
- thih9 3y agoWe don’t need renames for takeovers of useful words, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexa_(name)#Modern_popularity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexa_(name)#Modern_popularity > Popularity continued to climb and Alexa was ranked in the top 100 in the mid-1990s. According to the Social Security Administration, its highest popularity, 39th, was achieved in 2006. The name's popularity decreased rapidly after Amazon picked it as the wake word of its voice service Amazon Alexa, which was released worldwide in 2016. More at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2021/people-named-alexa-name-change-amazon/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2021/p...
- chrismorgan 3y agoIncidental: I’ve seen people increasingly using x.com links in their articles. How does that happen? As far as I can tell, it just redirects to twitter.com and that’s where everything is, but it doesn’t seem likely that everyone’s changing twitter to x, so is there something that is giving these links? I have far less confidence that x.com links will continue to work for years than twitter.com links.
- rsynnott 3y agoI assume if you're using the Twitter app and click "share link" it gives you an X-y one.
- delecti 3y agoYou assume correctly. Though x.com redirects to twitter.com, for what it's worth.
- bluedino 3y agoThey'll never become 'X', except internally. They'll always be known as "the site formerly known as Twitter". Just like Prince.
- InCityDreams 3y agoPrince wasn't formally known as ""the site formerly known as Twitter"."
- runamuck 3y agoIt will take. We once called KFC "Kentucky Fried Chicken."
- cantSpellSober 3y agoNobody called it that :) > This wasn’t so much of a problem when Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC—lots of us already called it that https://slate.com/business/2004/05/what-does-kfc-stand-for-now.html https://slate.com/business/2004/05/what-does-kfc-stand-for-n... Twitter has always been Twitter
- constantly 3y agoIt is a sad state of affairs that X.com is not a UFO Defense website.
- quesera 3y ago...only a few steps away, really. Give it time. :)
- quesera 3y agoIt really all depends on whom you follow.
- riffruff24 3y agohow about xcom.ufo? It looks wrong in lowercase.
- hasoleju 3y agoInteresting. I was not aware that so many TLDs allow single letter domain names. Since so many single letter domain names are for sale, it really seems to be hard to built a brand with a single letter. I personally think that the most important domain names are not the short ones. The most important domain names are the ones with a very big brand. Looking at "google.com" gives me a much stronger signal than looking at "z.com". So the brand really matters.
- indianets 3y agoI own 2 of the 2-character ccTLDs, it was a thing to boast around 10 years ago. Today no one cares, all they know are apps and google.
- xsc 3y agoWhat cctlds?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nottorp 3y agoI thought there's a minimum length for domains. How was Twitter even allowed to get x.com?
- quesera 3y agoThere used to be a minimum length for .com, .net, and .org. It was enforced by the registry to avoid confusion or special-case privileging. When domain names became big business, those rules were changed. Another old rule is that the domain name could not start with a digit.
- h2odragon 3y agoElon bought "x.com" from the folks who registered it very early on. He's been looking for an excuse to use it ever since paypal.
- rickcarlino 3y agoI kind of remember one of these single letter domains having a bunch of Java applets like chat widgets and such in the late 90s. Was it Z.com?
- mrb 3y agoIt bothers me that the author mistyped the z.com link (he links to q.com instead). How ironic given single letter domains are supposed to minimize typos like this...
- NeroVanbierv 3y agoFixed!
- jrmg 3y agoBut of a tangent, but: every time I see a link to an X post, I’m finding it increasingly weird that the Twitter -> X rename happened with a big splash some time ago now, but the actual x.com domain is still redirecting to twitter.com rather than the other way around.
- insin 3y agoHow many ways can things can go hilariously wrong if they try to properly switch it over to x.com? Until then calling it "twitter dot com" is still accurate.
- black_puppydog 3y agoprobably lacking some engineers to make sure all the CORS rules etc are updated. :D
- mcv 3y agoI'm surprised to see so many people and newspapers humouring Musk and obeying his name change when many pages on twitter.com still call it twitter. It's still Twitter. There's no need to call it X unless you want to want to do free advertising for Musk's name change.
- sonicanatidae 3y agoI see a lot of ExTwitter, so essentially the same thing. Changing the name to X was just a bad idea.
- yoyohello13 3y agoI just call it "Formerly Twitter"
- _1 3y agoHe still calls it Twitter. He kept saying it during that interview last week.
- xgkickt 3y ago“Twitter (currently known as X)”
- nofinator 3y agoa.org is an odd one. It's just an HTML form input that doesn't post anywhere, but it became a curious rabbit hole on r/hacking a few months ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/16yrggi/aorg/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/16yrggi/aorg/
- neom 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20230507233845/https://a.org/ghoubr-about https://web.archive.org/web/20230507233845/https://a.org/gho... Hmm.
- jofla_net 3y agoJust as suspected, overwhelmingly squatted.
- cirrus3 3y agohuh? did you read the article? Most are not available, and 2/3 of the .com ones available are being used not squatted. Almost all the .org ones are being used for relevant branding, not squatted. Not until you get into .co does there seems to be some squatting.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jofla_net 3y ago>q.com is the first domain that actually works its an honest mistake, please forgive me.
- matricaria 3y agoHow can one be too young to know Desmond Llewelyn?
- kianryan 3y agoI'm guessing under or around 30? His last onscreen appearance was in "The World Is Not Enough" in 1999. So if you were born in the mid 90s, you probably missed it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oK4aBWIWl8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oK4aBWIWl8
- ta1243 3y agoHe also thinks that x is "ancient software/internet organisation"
- raldi 3y agoI worked at Network Solutions more than 20 years ago (before the Verisign merger) and the lore they shared with me was that when the Domain Name System was first created they didn’t know if it would scale and reserved the single-letter domains (except the few that had already been registered) in case they needed to partition the namespace – like putting Microsoft under .m.i.com or maybe .f.t.com
- nadermx 3y agoNearly every single letter .com was registered by an Jon Postel who didn't want corporations to own the commercial rights to single letters.
- raldi 3y agoDo you have a citation for that?. I found a source for my claim above: All single octet length top level domain (TLD) names are reserved. Should the root zone ever get very large, there are technical solutions involving referral to servers providing splits of the zone based on the first name octet, which would be eased by having the single byte TLDs available. In addition, these provide a potential additional axis for DNS expansion. For like reasons, it is recommended that within TLD zones or indeed within any zone that is or might become very large, in the absence of a strong reason to the contrary, all single octet names be reserved. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-dnsind-iana-dns-01#section-3.3.1 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-dnsind-iana...
- nadermx 3y agohttps://www.icann.org/en/announcements/details/icann-establishes-forum-on-allocation-methods-for-single-letter-and-single-digit-domain-names-16-10-2007-en https://www.icann.org/en/announcements/details/icann-establi... "Before the current reserved name policy was imposed in 1993, Jon Postel (under the IANA function) took steps to reserve all available single character letters and numbers at the second level for future extensibility of the Internet (see 20 May 1994 email from Jon Postel, https://web.archive.org/web/20100301054658/http://ops.ietf.org/lists/namedroppers/namedroppers.199x/msg01156.html https://web.archive.org/web/20100301054658/http://ops.ietf.o...)" Although I can't find off hand where he said about the corporations but I do vaguely remember reading that at some time as well, may be wrong on that specific point though.
- causality0 3y agoWhat words are you supposed to say now? You xeeted about something and then someone re-xeeted you?
- seeknotfind 3y agoIt's so nice when you've been meaning to look something up, and here is an article about it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- AaronNewcomer 3y agoI worked for mDesign for and we owned m.design for a while. We used it for our corporate email addresses (aaron@m.design for example) but the majority of non-tech employees and vendors just couldn’t get used to it and tried things like aaron@m.design.com or etc so it got scrapped.