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I didn't know single letter domains were allowed? For example none of a.com, b.com, c.com etc. work - do other gTLD allow single letter domains then?
by AshleysBrain 12y ago
I didn't know single letter domains were allowed? For example none of a.com, b.com, c.com etc. work - do other gTLD allow single letter domains then?
- 0x0 12y agoX.org is pretty well known
- TheDong 12y agohttps://t.co/ https://t.co/ is very well known. Probably the most used single-character domain in existence :) Unrelated, but I've never understood why t.co counts against your tweet length.. for example, if you tweeted "ebay.c.uk", it would count for length(http://t.co/xxxxxxxxxx http://t.co/xxxxxxxxxx) characters (15 characters even though you only typed 9).
- TheLoneWolfling 12y agoRelated: http://qntm.org/twit http://qntm.org/twit
- calebegg 12y ago> This was the case as of 2011-08-16 [...] I'll let them know about it tomorrow and I expect it'll be rectified in a day or two Quite optimistic :-) especially since the situation has gotten worse by two characters since then.
- dmart 12y agoAccording to Twitter, t.co is mandatory in order to prevent phishing and calculate link popularity: https://support.twitter.com/articles/109623 https://support.twitter.com/articles/109623
- TheDong 12y agoI'm not asking why they use t.co. I'm asking why it counts against my tweet length. If I want to tweet 140 characters and they interpret some of them as a link, why can I no longer tweet my 140 characters because something on their system turned it into 150 characters? They could shorten it while still using my url's length for accounting. They already let you tweet more than 140 bytes due to unicode so it's clearly not a technical reason such as a char(140) db column. They very well could simply take min(len(t.co/url), len(orig_url)) without breaking any past tweets or changing the 140 character limit's spirit. It would just behave more logically.
- glitch 12y ago(1) Keeping it simple and consistent and (2) they want to ensure that as much relevant traffic goes through t.co as possible. If you want to lock people into t.co URLs, there's no reason for them to play games otherwise unless it truly starts eating into the character count. It's an avenue for profit through data mining. Also, the notion of blocking phishing sites is also there, but the real reason is data mining. They want as much desired, relevant data as possible about the URLs people are using on their service — where they're going, when they're going there, who's going there, etc., etc., etc. In the data, there is money. It's also about other untaped potential in being the middle man (e.g., injected ads) — not that they'll necessarily do such a thing, but from their perspective it's good to be in the position to exploit as many avenues of profit as possible.
- TheDong 12y agoYou misunderstood. I meant that they could use the minimum of those two lengths when checking the length of your tweet while still turning it into a t.co url either way. All traffic still goes through t.co. The behavior is identical to today except that it's simpler and consistent because it doesn't make my 140 character tweet invalid.
- glitch 12y agoThey could do something along those lines, but that would not be "keeping things simple". Plus, there is not significant motivation for them to do it — plain and simple. They could, but so far it's not worth the time/money investment. Every little feature, every little bit of work added and layered onto things has an associated cost/benefit to it. Simply put, it's not worth it to them at this present time.
- abraham 12y agoBecause your tweet is no longer "ebay.c.uk", Twitter changes is to to "http://t.co/xxxxxxxxxx" http://t.co/xxxxxxxxxx" which takes additional charactors that what you entered.
- Macha 12y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom... There's a list.
- mmahemoff 12y agoq, x, and z are the only registered .com domains. Go figure! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom... Of those, x is currently timing out, q redirects to some kind of customer-only login wall, and z is the winner as the only normal public-facing website on a single-letter .com. I wonder if eBay still owns x.com, having been Elon Musk's PayPal precursor. If so, it's a staggering oversight to leave the domain dormant.