Now that the list of new top-level domain applications for 2013 has been revealed, geeks around the world can start planning for the domain hacks of the future. Please.do.not.disturb.me was fun, and all, but the if many or all of these new registries are willing to sell their domains to anybody, there’s a lot of potential for new and unusual domain names.
I suspect we’ll soon be typing in addresses like:
- jack.and/jill – the .and TLD is clearly supposed to be for the Andalusian community in Spain, but I doubt that’s going to stop people from coming up with imaginative uses for domain names where you can just “put your own suffix” after the .and/, like we used to do before .isgay.com before it got taken over by domain squatters. (note that .gay will soon be a TLD, so there’s probably going to be a whole raft of these new sites soon…)
- crow.bar – or as we’ll say at the time, “.bar – it’s not just for bars any more!”
- I quite like the idea of sugar.beats, but I think a far more popular use will be “put your own suffix” sites, again, like rock.beats/scissors.
- ro.bot- .bot is one of the many TLDs that Amazon is going for, and it seems likely to me that they’re going to try to resell domains underneath it. I’m just not sure whether sex.bot or ro.bot will be first to be snatched up.
- not.just.broke.but.broker – perhaps you have to be in my head to find this amusing.
- fizz.buzz. This web site would have the best hit counter ever on it (why?).
- s.care, s.cars, s.expert, s.tab, and dozens of other domain names that are only a letter away from meaning something completely different – and that letter is often “s”.
- mon.day, sun.day, dooms.day, birth.day – etc. etc. I’d buy birth.day if the price was right, and then run a basic site spanning happy.birth.day, first.birth.day, and the like, with automatically-generated content on each. It’d be fun.
- yo.dog – a complete abuse of the .dog TLD, no matter what its purpose is supposed to be. Better still, I’d put a page at http://yo.dog.yo.dog/yo.dog, containing the message “I heard you like domain names in your domain names, so I put a domain name in a domain name.” (why?)
- electric.fan – the website that Koreans will set as one another’s home page, as a cruel prank against the superstitious.
- jelly.fish would be an awesome domain name! Who wouldn’t want to have the email address throw.stones@jelly.fish?
- mtee.ggee- the future domain name of Hungry Horse pubs? (get it? “empty gee-gee”?)
- a.boy.named.goo, after the Goo Goo Dolls album. But then, I don’t object to domain names with possibly-excessive numbers of dots in them, as the Summer Party On Earth website probably gives away. Hell: I could possibly be using a.home.called.earth as the domain name for our house, in 2013.
- fag.got – I’ll bet that homosexual sex blogger Dan Savage, who’s been trying to reclaim the word “faggot”, would love to have the email address hey@fag.got!
- bl.ink – I’ve got an idea for a webcam-based site, like ChatRoulette, but with facial recognition software that watches your eye movements. You get paired up with a random stranger and the pair of you have a staring contest, right over the Internet. If you win, you get a point. It’ll be awesome.
- commun.ist, rac.ist, anarch.ist, etc. – I’m sure that Istanbul, for whom the .ist TLD is intended, won’t mind if we borrow their new domain name for a few amusing addresses. Like the email address shoot@the.rac.ist, for example.
- bob.lob.law/law/blog – with apologies to those who don’t follow Arrested Development.
- bi.ngo – sure,.bingo is likely to exist anyway, but this way’s more fun.
- fuck.off – I have no idea what anybody else expected the.off TLD to be used for, if not this.
- child.ren – I quite like this, because it makes not only a full word, but the first part is a word, too.
- im.off.ski – faux Russian is never going to go out of style.
- tube.tube.tube – if I can, I’m totally setting this site up in 2013. All that there’ll be is the picture, below, which makes me smile every time I see it.
Honestly, though: it feels like all of these new top-level domain name opportunities take a lot of the fun out of domain hacks. The more TLDs we have, the easier it is to put together words and phrases with the opportunities given.
Scrabble wouldn’t be so enjoyable if each player had a rack of, say, 30 tiles, rather than just 7. The restriction (and working around them) is what makes domain-name-based jokes so funny, in my mind. What are we supposed to do in a world where anybody with a spare $185,000 USD can have anything he wants?
When I realise that the era of funny domain hacks is coming to an end, it makes me a little sad. But then I look at that picture of a polar bear and everything’s okay again. Tuuuuuuube!
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