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

nerology.substack.com

31–40 of 201 posts

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

#31
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People just google “bob builder” anyway. Domain doesn’t matter so much.

And then your competitor advertises for "bob builder". And then you start whining about how mean google is, even though you were the one who decided to use google as a domain resolution service, which it was not intended for. There's a reason amazon decided to refer to itself as amazon.com until everyone got it, and that probably saves them billions in google ads per year.

1. As a consumer I'm far better off searching for people and seeing that ad though, so it'd take a lot of effort to make me type the url in directly.

2. Even if people know they want amazon.com, they're still going to search for amazon.com instead of figure out where the url bar is.

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

#32
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People just google “bob builder” anyway. Domain doesn’t matter so much.

And then your competitor advertises for "bob builder". And then you start whining about how mean google is, even though you were the one who decided to use google as a domain resolution service, which it was not intended for. There's a reason amazon decided to refer to itself as amazon.com until everyone got it, and that probably saves them billions in google ads per year.

> you were the one who decided

Most people google everything. A significant number of people google "google" in their browser's search/URL-bar to get to Google.com and search for whatever site they could have gone to directly. Builder Bob isn't going to change the average user's behavior in navigating the web.

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

#33

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.

Considering that the Fed targets 2%/yr that sounds nearly reasonable.

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

#35

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.

I assume if you're using the Twitter app and click "share link" it gives you an X-y one.

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

#36
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…

X.com probably makes sense in the assumption that he turns Twitter into a WeChat clone as kinda 'everything app' which would obviously fail. But as 'everything app' X is kinda a strong brand IMO.

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

#37
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…

> X.com is pretty stupid as well, you can't meaningfully use it as a brand.

Just "x" alone isn't really the brand.

It's more like "x.com" is the canonical name.

From that perspective, "x" or "x.com" is about as good as brand recognition can get. It's simple and perfectly descriptive of an "everything app" and payment processing business.

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

#38

Nissan 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_Comput...

In 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.co...

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

#39
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.

I'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?

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

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but then one letter domains and new gTLDs are worthless. If the domain doesn't really matter why not then get bobbuilder365q.com (or some other TLD that's cheaper).

I guess because if I sw that domain I would assume I was being phished.

Or linked to an MLM affiliate

idlez.amway.com!

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