Ask HN: What do you think of the new TLDs? (.sexy, .tips, .guru etc)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7352120

by karangoeluw • 12 years ago

11 12 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What do you guys think? Do they have any future? Can general public adapt to typing JohnDoe.photos instead of the traditional .com/.net/.org etc?

JacobAldridge2• 12 years ago

Less and less do I find myself typing in a URL, as opposed to clicking a link (via a DDG search or in an email etc). So I think it's fair to make a comparison to phone numbers - I know mine, my wife's, and the one I had as a kid growing up. I couldn't tell you my new home phone number if my life depended on it.

No doubt there will continue to be some confusion for a period (just ask the owners of www.utube.com). But as a URL becomes a link, as opposed to a discrete string of letters needing to be remembered, it will become less important. Interestingly, this will obviously reduce the value of the TLDs and specific URLs (though not entirely, because they will have some relevance to SEO).

rectangletangle2• 12 years ago

I disagree, a domain name is part of a company's brand. Having it be short and memorable (so it can easily be recalled and searched for later), is an important part of brand recognition.

karangoeluw• 12 years ago

So domains don't matter anymore (or won't in foreseeable future)?

JacobAldridge2• 12 years ago

They will matter less - just like businesses used to pay a premium for a "memorable" phone number. There will, for the foreseeable future, be benefits - some memorability, especially while ".com" remains the "only" TLD for most people, and also SEO benefits (I suspect example.com will rank higher than example.tips, all other things being equal).

But over the next few years (and it may be 5-10), as people get used to a wide variety of TLDs, I expect businesses to start taking advantage of the new real estate.

I doubt many average consumers could explain the difference between tips.example.com and example.tips, especially if it's a trusted link rather than a URL on a tv advert. So Example LLC, faced with a 5-figure price to secure their .com or a 2-3 figure price to secure a different TLD will surely begin taking the lower cost option. And I suspect this will become a virtuous cycle away from .com's ubiquity[1].

[1] The next question is why .biz etc didn't work. I would likely have made this prediction ten years ago, and been wrong, though shrinking availability of .coms makes it more likely now.

downplay3• 12 years ago

They have application in URIs. And there is a matter of building trust relationships through them. The domain alone isn't enough to do that. I tend to lean on search engines to affirm the genuineness of a domain.

Domain names provide an abstraction in that you can hide web services behind them with routing, ports and protocols.

Personally I'd rather something like the Star Trek computer interface and not care about domain names and urls.

Me: Computer, surmise the article by Foo Bar about Such and Such please.

If ambiguities were presented the computer would interrogate me to help filter them. The computer being the interface abstracting away how and where the info came from. Unless I asked of course! This isn't a million miles away from a modern search engine, it's just I have to do further filtering/querying.

gregimba• 12 years ago

I think its going to be a big mess and the domain registrars are going to make boatloads of money. I don't want to imagine the number of phishing sites that are going to be made.

rectangletangle2• 12 years ago

I think weird TLDs have already caught on. How many recent startups have there been where their name is some strange combination of an abbreviated/misspelled word, and an obscure TLD functioning as the word's suffix?

Names are a limited commodity, and short memorable names sell.

downplay3• 12 years ago

And there are counter examples of this too. Del.icio.us, was just a damn awkward domain name. So it morphed into delicious.com. I assumed we had Web 2.0 domain names like Flickr arrive as a result of most of the dictionary being registered/parked. I.e. flicker.com. It had the added bonus of being slightly different and memorable. Though I struggle a little with that domain name because of the awkward non-standard spelling.

Prefixing with an i, is a sneaky namespace hack work around.

Then people jumped on alternate tlds, country coded tlds, from obscure and war-torn countries. Again that opens up your options. For a time.

I'm increasingly coming around to just a boring old .com. Even the guardian news outlet, moved from their .co.uk to .com recently.

Memorable is good, and short is easier to type.

ChuckFrank• 12 years ago

There's a major battle shaping up on TLDs like .health. The WHO wants it to be used like .gov and .edu, and others want it to be freely available for things like Snakeoil.health or Homeopathy.health. And this is the case for thousands of TLDs

And yes, once the dust settles, the public will be willing to type in any one of the thousands of new TLDs. The brokers are going to make their most money off people having to protect this huge market for trademark issues. Disney will have to buy every one. Disney.sexy, Disney.tips, Disney.guru, etc. etc.

(edit changed copyright to trademark.)

downplay3• 12 years ago

Slightly off-topic but what about the alternative of sub-domains?

For web sites I tend to use the www subdomain, because it offers convenience and flexibility with CNAMEing, but I absolutely loathe the www subdomain. Almost as much as 'com' as a tld. I assume com is an abbreviation of company. Many websites aren't companies so that doesn't make much sense to me.

Despite my personal gripes, it's mainly aesthetics, and these fall into the background, you fail to notice or care.

I rather a general identifier. Ambiguity isn't all that terrible: Apple Records and Apple Computers. Coke the drink, the drug, the fuel etc.

A name by itself doesn't always mean that much without context.

gesman• 12 years ago

.anal is missing again!

spb• 12 years ago

Seeing as how .info, .mobi, .aero etc. never took off, I don't think these new TLDs are really likely to displace .com either. The thing about ".com" is that, to the average person, .com is the thing that makes a domain a domain, like a file extension. They may also recognize .org and .net as other extensions, like file formats. However, when you just start tacking on arbitrary words with pre-existing connotations, the domain-recognizability of them goes out the window: nobody would guess that "fast.bikes" is a domain rather than just a tagline that uses dots instead of spaces.

Ask HN: What do you think of the new TLDs? (.sexy, .tips, .guru etc)

Related Stories