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X.com is Twitter, but what are [a-z].com?

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21–30 of 201 posts

Re: X.com is Twitter, but what are [a-z].com?

#21
post #5

One 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 ju…

No, I disagree with the idea that one letter domains look wrong. Especially with the many new TLDs, more often than not short URL services use single character domains. Take g.co for example—google uses that in ads everywhere. It’s modern equivalent of calling a short code phone number unrecognizable. But yet most people still instinctively know how to text them for information. However for really esoteric TLDs, I can see why it would be more of a problem, not because the length of the domain, but that the TLD, like .jobs, just doesn’t sound right.

Re: X.com is Twitter, but what are [a-z].com?

#23
Incidental: 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.

Re: X.com is Twitter, but what are [a-z].com?

#24
post #19

I 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.

You can just call it Twitter, in the same way that everyone just says Facebook rather than Meta and Google rather than Alphabet.

Re: X.com is Twitter, but what are [a-z].com?

#25

Tangent 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...

That's less than 3%/year which seems not so bad considering how so many things were up the past few years.

Re: X.com is Twitter, but what are [a-z].com?

#28
post #24
post #19

I 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.

You can just call it Twitter, in the same way that everyone just says Facebook rather than Meta and Google rather than Alphabet.

This 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.

Re: X.com is Twitter, but what are [a-z].com?

#30
post #3

I 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…

Being 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

Calling 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.

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