Does anyone care about domain names anymore?
Various news outlets are breathlessly reporting that ICANN (the organization responsible for managing internet domain names) will effectively allow any top level domain (TLD) (for example “.com” and “.org” are TLDs).
Am I alone in wondering why anyone gives a rat’s? In fact, in thinking that this is a usability disaster waiting to happen?
First up, does anyone actually type a domain name into a browser more than once at most? (auto complete in any browser since about Viola means that once you’ve been to a domain more than zero times, typing the first two or three letters of a domain name is all you need to do).
In fact isn’t that what the search field in most browsers is for?
If anything, this actually devalues .com domain names — many browsers currently assume “.com” for any word you type into the address field (others assume you want to search for that term on the web). So if you already own “.com”, the value of this auto complete function just vanished — afterall, if a user types “pepsi” — do they mean “pepsi.com”, or “something.pepsi”?
But it gets worse — right now the standard structure of domains is something like this
“http://domainname.com/contact”
But if we move to arbitrary TLDs, we’ll start seeing “http://contact.pepsi”, http://contactus.coke” and so on — there goes a lot of the value of autocomplete of URLs in browser address fields. Well, pretty much all of it. And of course, out of habit, or because older browsers (which take a while to go away you know) will still auto-complete the “.com” bit, folks will keep going to “.pepsi.com” — for example “contact.pepsi.com” instead of “contact.pepsi” (which looks just wrong dammit) giving a confusing 404 message, and creating an order of magnitude more complexity for server redirects.
Then, where the hell is the home page? URLs like “http://pepsi.com” by convention direct the user to the home for a site. Now, we’ll need something more — “http://home.pepsi”? But will everyone follow that convention? What about foreign languages?
Who exactly drove this decision? In whose interests is it? Because, I don’t really see it as being in anyone’s interest (other than say ICANN, who will make a killing on domains like .xxx). But one thing’s for sure — breaking well understood patterns for users around URLs is not a user centred decision.
File this under bone headed anti user decisions on the web.
I’ve started seeing loads of advertising saying “type X into google” instead of giving a URL, I guess because most URLs these days are totally stupid as people get more and more desperate for a “good” domain.
I read somewhere that ICANN is trying to raise $20 million so I guess it’s in their own interests rather than for the greater good.
I’m still resentful that we’re .com.au rather than just .au.
Yes, those “type this into google” posters you see round the streets of Sydney (and no doubt elsewhere) were one of the things that came immediately to mind when I read this, along with QR codes (semacodes) which is Japan are on everything, and every phone recognizes them.
While many a business person I speak to gets very excited about the great domain name they managed to get, I suspect the only business value in domain names is selling them to even more clueless people. Has a domain name ever been a key driver in the success of a business?
[…] to my little Friday afternoon rant, BuilderAU has a more detailed and thought out piece on the new Arbitrary TLD […]
The people behind the insanity are those who stand to make money selling domains you don’t need. Not ICANN BTW, but the registrars like GoDaddy, Tucows and the like. There’s a whole industry now called “domainers” who stand to make a fortune. If you think domain cluster registrations are a PITA now, wait till there’s hundreds more to have to cover to make sure a competitor doesn’t get “your” domain (another practice I disagree with). It’s not the name that matters, it’s how you market it that brings the business.
Good point Mark.
Just say no to domain names! Seriously — will they be relevant in 5 years time? Sure. but just how much?
The only domain names I can think of that were relatively crucial to the success of the venture would be the tinyurl/bit.ly et al.
Look at the big boys: YouTube, eBay, Google, MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter, Flickr. None of them really make any sense at all. That said, they are all relatively short (6 – 8 characters) and easy to type / remember (Flickr is probably the biggest exception).