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

nerology.substack.com

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

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> It's more like "x.com" is the canonical name. It sounds like a porn website. I don't think most business owners would want this as their brand, but I guess Elon is special in this way as well.

[flagged]

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

#82
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.

X.com is where you go to save Earth from the alien invasion.

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

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think this was true years ago, but now that the general public is internet aware, a billboard with B.com or Z.com would work just fine. In Asia they don't put the .com or .whatever on the ads, they just put the brand name and the general public know to search for that term.

Maybe, I find that people are still surprised when they need my email and it's just @ .net and not @hotmail.com / @gmail.com or something like that.

I have had people email me at last.first.net@gmail.com (I registered it after few missed emails) instead of last@first.net

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

#84
post #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.

I'm not sure. It's very tech-nerd (like me) and tech-bro oriented. The logo as well, I'm pretty sure it please the aestetics of tech bros, but at least some nerds/geek find it stupid, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't bring a lot of new female users.

Twitter was already one of the most male-dominated social media (especially outside the US), I think it would be interesting to see the evolution now that this became X. I'd bet a huge majority of new joiners are male (due yo the branding change), and a small majority of 'leaver' are female.

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

#85

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.

They'll never become 'X', except internally. They'll always be known as "the site formerly known as Twitter". Just like Prince.

It will take. We once called KFC "Kentucky Fried Chicken."

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

#86

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.

Not so bad!?! If my house value plummeted 30% in nine years that would make me furious.

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

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

X.com is where you go to save Earth from the alien invasion.

Not to be confused with https://www.x-kom.pl/ which is where you go to buy parts for your new PC if you live in Poland.

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

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> I'm just disappointed that people go along with takeovers of useful words: x, meta, alphabet. X is not a word.

Still, it’s probably the most generic letter that you can use alone in a lot of domains.

If you had the opportunity to buy any unique letter domain name of your choice but you may choose only one, most people on this planet would chose X because it can mean anything.

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

#89
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.

I think we really should adopt the name "X". Because Musk took Twitter and turned it into something else, which is not the old Twitter anymore. So giving it a different name is fitting. That said, I don't necessarily like the name "X".

It’s not like Twitter wasn’t a shitshow several years before Musk. Sure he made it way worse but it was already a global dumpster fire.

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

#90
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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).

".com" looks professional and, more importantly, it very clearly communicates "this is a website address." If it were "bobbuilder.services" it could be a website, but maybe it's an instagram handle or something else.

Otherwise you are correct that it doesn't really matter. The main value of gTLDs is that we ran out of decent available .coms a while ago.

Single letter domains look cool (I guess) and signal that the org has the money to buy a premium domain. Similar to "mortgage.com"

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