A huge number of new TLDs are set to become available shortly offering Web site owners the opportunity to secure names that are more geographically, religiously or professionally relevant and specific.
We are choosing to publish the entire list here including internationalised domains (IDNs) to help you ascertain which may be of most value to you. Please feel free to tweet us @BatterseaNet with any questions.
Eli Altman has been naming things for most of his life. At age 6, he helped his father, Danny Altman, the founder of the San Francisco branding consultancy A Hundred Monkeys, on a naming project for the toy store FAO Schwarz. He has named 400 companies and brands since and joined his dad’s business in 2002.
But a couple of years ago, Altman started noticing what he saw as a distasteful trend: a wave of nonsensical names. Whereas the rules of English usage dictate that an e or an o usually precedes an r, entrepreneurs were starting companies with names such as Flickr, Socializr, and Touristr. Others were doubling or even tripling their o’s, i’s, and u’s — as in Zooomr, Rowdii, Yuuguu, and even Oooooc. With the rise of the Internet, names made of words that mean something, like Apple Computer, went out of favor. “Everyone wants these short, catchy names,” says Altman.
Web addresses are cheap — less than $10 a year in most cases — and trillions of them are still available. The problem is that short, pronounceable names ending with the popular .com extension are increasingly rare. “All the normal words in spoken English are taken,” Altman says. “Any short combination of letters and numbers is taken. Anything good under six letters is taken.” The result has been a proliferation of silly-sounding company names, with a recent trend toward handles that sound as if they might have come from science fiction. (One software company set up a website that challenges readers to discern between companies and Star Wars characters. For instance, Sebulba is from the fictional planet Malastare; Oyogi is a software maker in Raleigh, North Carolina.)
Some 80 million .com domain names are currently registered, a bit more than 800 times the number of domain-friendly words in Project Gutenberg’s online dictionary. Registered names proliferated after Google introduced its automated advertising system, AdSense, in 2003. The service made domain speculation — or domaining — a much more profitable business, allowing domainers to buy names and hold on to them indefinitely while making money with advertising.
Today, millions of names are available on auction sites such as Sedo.com and SnapNames.com, at prices that range from a few hundred dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars. ZX8.com was recently on offer for $330, while Mouse.com was going for $350,000.
What should companies that still hope to snag unclaimed names do? Altman says there are plenty of words available to go along with extensions like .net. But most consumers expect for-profit companies to have .com names. “Dot-com is just where customers’ minds are,” says Bob Parsons, founder of Go Daddy, the largest registrar of domain names. Christopher Johnson, author of the blog The Name Inspector, says that longer domain names can be just as effective as shorter names so long as they have “recognizable parts,” like Craigslist or Photobucket.
As available names dry up, entrepreneurs are scrounging around for what’s left. David Rusenko, the founder and CEO of a website and blog-building service, wrote a software program that randomly generated short, pronounceable names available for purchase. A lot of the names the program spit out contained multiple z’s, but Rusenko found his name, Weebly, within a few hours. (The runner-up was Moovo.) Weebly “sounds more like a kid’s toy,” one blogger wrote. Rusenko disagrees. “It’s short, it’s brandable, and people remember it,” he says.
Chinese people should soon find it easier to browse the web as domain names written in Chinese win approval.
Net address overseer Icann has approved the creation of domains that use only Chinese characters.
The decision builds on earlier work to create internationalised domain names (IDNs) using with non-Latin characters.
The first IDNs were for Arabic scripts and Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were the first to register domains using them.
Icann said firms in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan would soon be issuing domains for people and organisations within their countries that are written with all Chinese scripts.
“One fifth of the world speaks Chinese and that means we just increased the potential online accessibility for roughly a billion people,” said Icann head Rod Beckstrom in a statement.
He said the decision goes some way towards addressing the contradiction that 60% of the net’s users are non-native English speakers yet the dominant language online is English.
This is because when the domain name system was set up addresses, such as the familiar .com and .uk, were written only with Latin characters.
Workarounds for this have been developed which mix Latin and native character sets. Mr Beckstrom said many years of work by the Internet Engineering Task Force had made it possible to use domains written completely in one text.
Icann said that IDNs in 20 languages were being prepared with Thai and Tamil expected to follow soon.
News about the decision was released at the 38th international Icann meeting held in Brussels from 20-25 June.
At the same meeting the .xxx domain, which will cater to pornographic websites, also won approval.
