New Domain Extensions
Feeds
Tuesday, 15th July 2008
It's been all over the news for a while now and in essence, the idea is that they will open up top level domains (TLDs) so people can suggest new ones. The thinking behind this is that there aren't very many worthwhile .com domains left and it would be nice to use TLDs in a more semantic way (for example, the almost inevitable .xxx TLD)!
Thing is, there are already too many domains for people to bother with, which means we follow a certain pattern when we're heading to a website.
- We already know the website well, so it's in our favourites. The web address is now irrelevant.
- We think we know the address, so we take a punt using a common TLD, in the UK we'll try .com and .co.uk.
- We're copying the web address from somewhere, like a business card.
- We can't be bothered, so we use a search engine instead.
So semantic TLDs aren't really much help. In fact, in the UK we already have .me.uk, which is for personal websites and .co.uk, which is for company websites and neither are actually used for their intended context (as you can tell as you're visiting www.stevefenton.co.uk and I'm a person, not a company - I used .co.uk as it's more likely to be attempted than .me.uk)!
There was also a lot of excitement when .mobi domains were released. These were intended for people to set up a mobile version of their site for hand held devices, but even on mobile devices people won't bother trying a .mobi "address guess". We'd all rather enter the normal address for the site and let the site owner deal with our request by giving us the normal website, which normally works just fine, or a low-graphics version if they're worried that our phone can't cope with their website.
So, it's nice to know that more TLDs will be made available, but once all of the trademarks, brands and name claims have been registered to their respective owners, there won't really be anything particularly good left over anyway - and you register those names at risk of sending people to a website with the same name, but a better TLD.
Ah, domains. What a pain they are!!!