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

https://nerology.substack.com/p/xcom-is-twitter-but-what-are-a-zcom

by NeroVanbierv • 3 years ago

177 189 3 years ago

nerology.substack.com

DarkNova6• 3 years ago

I was hoping that b.org would be a Star Trek fansite.

Biganon• 3 years ago

And that k.org would redirect to the website of a brand that makes musical instruments or something

jadbox• 3 years ago

or k.org for KDE

qingcharles• 3 years ago

LOL. 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• 3 years ago

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! :-)

tjpnz• 3 years ago

They're people's initials.

kristopolous• 3 years ago

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

sublinear3• 3 years ago

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.

BitwiseFool• 3 years ago

I 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• 3 years ago

I'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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

If 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. :)

ak_111• 3 years ago

I think there are some 3 letter domain available on most TLD including .ai, I wonder why these haven't been taken up yet?

geraldhh2• 3 years ago

new-age tld's don't count

indianets2• 3 years ago

Because of exorbitant price set by the registry. After the apps boom, domain name has lost half of it’s value. And, rest was messed up by the new TLDs.

I strongly believe if there was original gTLDs and ccTLDs, internet would be a better place.

robin_reala• 3 years ago

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...

sumedh• 3 years ago

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...

mrweasel5• 3 years ago

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 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.

eli4• 3 years ago

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

mikehollinger2• 3 years 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?”

mrweasel5• 3 years ago

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).

amadeuspagel• 3 years ago

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.

andrewfromx• 3 years ago

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.

mrweasel5• 3 years ago

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

extheat• 3 years ago

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.

swozey6• 3 years ago

When I see a t.co (x.co now?) link I have literally no idea where it's going to take me at all and I am far, far less likely to click one of them knowing that it's a url shortener. This is such a common thing that there are browser extensions/slack(discord/teams/etc) options to unfurl urls.

herbst• 3 years ago

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.

DonHopkins• 3 years ago

Not as strong as i.com.

sgc• 3 years ago

If you abstract from the current porn / nightclub styling of their branding, I agree it has potential.

mrweasel5• 3 years ago

If "X" can transition to a WeChat clone, then maybe, until then it's a shitty brand. The media always needs to present is as: "The social media platform X", "X, formerly Twitter" or "Elon Musks X". The last one seems to indicate the Elon Musk is a bigger brand than "X".

orwin• 3 years ago

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.

sublinear3• 3 years ago

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.

bad_user• 3 years ago

Except it's missing the "everything" aspect, payments processing, or the support of the Chinese government.

FartyMcFarter• 3 years ago

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.

7ewis2• 3 years ago

I personally like brand names that _look_ like they could be words, but aren't like Spotify, Twitter, Monzo, Reddit, Google etc.

Believe they need to be short and easy to Google even if you don't know how to spell them (not saying the above brand names are perfect). Find it annoying hearing Xero having to be spelt out on the radio to stop people going to zero.com.

Not particularly a fan of combining two English words together like Facebook, Freetrade, GitHub etc. but the worst is when companies try to own a common word like Apple.

sdenton4• 3 years ago

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

eli4• 3 years ago

It's not though. Musk writes it as a single stylized letter and the company name is "X Corp" not "X.com"

riffruff242• 3 years ago

Did you mean X-COM, the 1994 turn based game? Or XCOM, the 2012 reboot of the same game?

I jest but those Firaxis guys must be eager to do something about this whole thing before twitter blew up. Its around the time for the third installment of the reboot.

drivers99• 3 years ago

Or "Brand X", the generic "other leading brand" of old commercials, and therefore associated with inferiority in general.

andsoitis2• 3 years ago

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

I don't know that it is self-evident.

The open source implementation of the X Window System is provided by the x.org foundation. https://x.org/wiki/

georgyo• 3 years ago

X.org is maybe not in the same bucket as X.com. x.org is very tech oriented and the people who visit that site are much more likely to appreciate the unusual domain.

It doesn't change the fact that it looks a bit weird.

I think any domain that is shorter than it's tld looks a bit funky and requires a second look to process that it is real.

chimeracoder• 3 years ago

I don't know that it is self-evident.
The open source implementation of the X Window System is provided by the x.org foundation. https://x.org/wiki/

I know way more about the inner mechanics of X11 than the average Linux user (which is saying something), but if you had asked me in a different context what x.org pointed to, I would have had no idea. (And then would have said, "oh, right" as soon as you told me the answer).

That's the tell-tale sign of a bad branding decision. I'm not going to fault X too much for that since they literally predate the Web[0], and because they're targeting a very specialized audience, but any mainstream company that makes the same mistake in 2023 deserves whatever criticism they get for it.

[0] The foundation itself doesn't, but the underlying projects do, and the foundation was formed as a merger so it depends on where you choose to start the clock.

fluoridation2• 3 years ago

I mean, "X" is also a bad brand name. X11 is much better.

FireBeyond• 3 years ago

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

My email address is first@last.me - I now automatically say "no .com" or similar. Too many CS experiences where "we can't find your email address" "try first@last.me.com" "Oh, there it is".

SanjayMehta• 3 years ago

f.org’s terms of service are worth a read.

https://f.org/?page=rv

yial• 3 years ago

Identical to

https://g.org/?page=rv

Coincidence ?

calderknight• 3 years ago

not coincidence, one is "in good we trust", the other one is "in code we trust"

bruce3434342• 3 years ago

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...

karmakaze• 3 years ago

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

voxadam• 3 years ago

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

runamuck2• 3 years ago

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

thih95• 3 years ago

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.

kibwen2• 3 years ago

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

thih95• 3 years ago

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.

EarthLaunch• 3 years ago

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?

red_trumpet• 3 years ago

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".

pjerem2• 3 years ago

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.

quenix• 3 years ago

Wow, http://g.org is weird. Wonder what the story behind it is.

cubefox• 3 years ago

I wonder what's behind that login screen.

Grimburger• 3 years ago

Of course the Illuminati are using godaddy as a registrar, I'm not even surprised.

lygaret• 3 years ago

They're a portfolio partner; there's some useful synergies there.

prox• 3 years ago

Looks 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

yvely• 3 years ago

Other 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• 3 years ago

Most grand lodges of states employ both men and women even if the organization is men only.

chrismorgan• 3 years ago

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.

rsynnott• 3 years ago

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

delecti• 3 years ago

You assume correctly. Though x.com redirects to twitter.com, for what it's worth.

bluedino2• 3 years ago

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

Just like Prince.

InCityDreams• 3 years ago

Prince wasn't formally known as ""the site formerly known as Twitter"."

runamuck2• 3 years ago

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

hasoleju• 3 years ago

Interesting. 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.

indianets2• 3 years ago

I 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• 3 years ago

What cctlds?

nottorp• 3 years ago

I thought there's a minimum length for domains. How was Twitter even allowed to get x.com?

quesera3• 3 years ago

There 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• 3 years ago

Elon 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.

constantly• 3 years ago

It is a sad state of affairs that X.com is not a UFO Defense website.

quesera3• 3 years ago

...only a few steps away, really. Give it time. :)

quesera3• 3 years ago

It really all depends on whom you follow.

riffruff242• 3 years ago

how about xcom.ufo? It looks wrong in lowercase.

rickcarlino• 3 years ago

I 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• 3 years ago

It 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• 3 years ago

Fixed!

jrmg2• 3 years ago

But 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.

black_puppydog• 3 years ago

probably lacking some engineers to make sure all the CORS rules etc are updated. :D

mcv2• 3 years ago

I'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• 3 years ago

I see a lot of ExTwitter, so essentially the same thing.

Changing the name to X was just a bad idea.

yoyohello13• 3 years ago

I just call it "Formerly Twitter"

_1• 3 years ago

He still calls it Twitter. He kept saying it during that interview last week.

xgkickt• 3 years ago

“Twitter (currently known as X)”

jedberg• 3 years ago

Most media I've seen says "posted to X (formerly Twitter)". So they still feel that the brand is not strong enough to not explain what it used to be.

joenot443• 3 years ago

I’m not so sure. Time marches on. There was a time in Toronto when everyone called it the Skydome and said it always would be.

Nowadays kids only know it as the Rogers Centre and may have only heard Skydome from their parents. If X/Twitter is still around in 10 years (I’m pretty 50/50 on those odds) then I think it’ll be known officially and colloquially as X, not Twitter.

pixelmonkey• 3 years ago

I use "Twitter/X" because if you just say "X" no one knows what the heck you are talking about.

halJordan• 3 years ago

It's simple professionalism. X is its name. Quite disheartening to constantly see the pull towards unprofessionalism just because the target is an other. Your own integrity should be pulling you to represent yourself correctly. It should have nothing to do with your external feelings towards the thing. And especially have nothing to do with your desire to hurt something.

teknico• 3 years ago

Xwitter.

mardifoufs• 3 years ago

What the hell does it have to do with musk? If a corporation changes its name, journalists usually use the new name. Especially for big corporations. Do you want them to not use the new (very stupid) name, just to... own the musk?

js8• 3 years ago

Despite all the billionaire meta-craze, people still use Google, Facebook and Twitter.

jrmg2• 3 years ago

I don’t think this is a good comparison. For Google and Facebook, that’s still what the products are called.

insin• 3 years ago

How 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.

nofinator• 3 years ago

a.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/

neom• 3 years ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20230507233845/https://a.org/gho...

Hmm.

jofla_net2• 3 years ago

Just as suspected, overwhelmingly squatted.

cirrus3• 3 years ago

huh? 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.

jofla_net2• 3 years ago

q.com is the first domain that actually works

its an honest mistake, please forgive me.

matricaria• 3 years ago

How can one be too young to know Desmond Llewelyn?

kianryan• 3 years ago

I'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

ta1243• 3 years ago

He also thinks that x is "ancient software/internet organisation"

raldi4• 3 years ago

I 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

nadermx4• 3 years ago

Nearly every single letter .com was registered by an Jon Postel who didn't want corporations to own the commercial rights to single letters.

raldi4• 3 years ago

Do 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...

causality0• 3 years ago

What words are you supposed to say now? You xeeted about something and then someone re-xeeted you?

seeknotfind• 3 years ago

It's so nice when you've been meaning to look something up, and here is an article about it.

mariorojas• 3 years ago

interesting... I thought all the available one-letter .com domains cost hundreds of millions of dollars

AaronNewcomer• 3 years ago

I 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.

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

Related Stories