But of a tangent, but: every time I see a link to an X post, I’m finding it increasingly weird that the Twitter -> X rename happened with a big splash some time ago now, but the actual x.com domain is still redirecting to twitter.com rather than the other way around.

Nissan used to own z.com. As a side note, they don’t actually own nissan.com, more info at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_v._Nissan_Comput...

I worked at Network Solutions more than 20 years ago (before the Verisign merger) and the lore they shared with me was that when the Domain Name System was first created they didn’t know if it would scale and reserved the single-letter domains (except the few that had already been registered) in case they needed to partition the namespace – like putting Microsoft under .m.i.com or maybe .f.t.com

I was hoping that b.org would be a Star Trek fansite.

I remember around 1999 when I used to work for a big ISP and I ran a simple perl script that would "nslookup" all combination of 3 letters domains. It generated a huge list of available domains, but none that called my attention because all the good ones (not just random letters) seemed to be already registered. I would never thought that all those random 3 letter domains would sell for so much money many years later! :-)

One letter domains has the same issue as many of the gTLDs, they aren't particularly useful in terms of brand recognition. X.com is pretty stupid as well, you can't meaningfully use it as a brand.

Take bob.builders, it's a perfectly valid domain, but if you see it on the back of a van, even if it's www.bob.builders, it's not recognizably as a website. www.b.com has the exact same problem, even x.com / www.x.com is just weird and looks like a mistake. The one letter domains have the added issue that you have no association that might indicate where the domain will take you.

Wow, http://g.org is weird. Wonder what the story behind it is.

It is a sad state of affairs that X.com is not a UFO Defense website.

I don’t like the letter “x” being used as a company name, I find it impractical and confusing.

I’d like to call it something different, and since many people say “x/twitter”, I guess others have similar thoughts.

I’m not unhappy that there are few other single letter domains, especially if they were to be claimed by corporations.

f.org’s terms of service are worth a read.

https://f.org/?page=rv

a.org is an odd one. It's just an HTML form input that doesn't post anywhere, but it became a curious rabbit hole on r/hacking a few months ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/16yrggi/aorg/

I own 2 of the 2-character ccTLDs, it was a thing to boast around 10 years ago. Today no one cares, all they know are apps and google.

Interesting. I was not aware that so many TLDs allow single letter domain names. Since so many single letter domain names are for sale, it really seems to be hard to built a brand with a single letter. I personally think that the most important domain names are not the short ones. The most important domain names are the ones with a very big brand. Looking at "google.com" gives me a much stronger signal than looking at "z.com". So the brand really matters.

Incidental: I’ve seen people increasingly using x.com links in their articles. How does that happen? As far as I can tell, it just redirects to twitter.com and that’s where everything is, but it doesn’t seem likely that everyone’s changing twitter to x, so is there something that is giving these links?

I have far less confidence that x.com links will continue to work for years than twitter.com links.

I worked for mDesign for and we owned m.design for a while. We used it for our corporate email addresses (aaron@m.design for example) but the majority of non-tech employees and vendors just couldn’t get used to it and tried things like aaron@m.design.com or etc so it got scrapped.

It's so nice when you've been meaning to look something up, and here is an article about it.

It bothers me that the author mistyped the z.com link (he links to q.com instead). How ironic given single letter domains are supposed to minimize typos like this...

Tangent but

> This seems weird as the domain was sold in 2014 for 6.8M USD, which would be around 8.9M USD today taking inflation into account.

Caught my attention, 30% inflation in just 9 years...

I kind of remember one of these single letter domains having a bunch of Java applets like chat widgets and such in the late 90s. Was it Z.com?

What words are you supposed to say now? You xeeted about something and then someone re-xeeted you?

I thought there's a minimum length for domains. How was Twitter even allowed to get x.com?

How can one be too young to know Desmond Llewelyn?

Just as suspected, overwhelmingly squatted.

interesting... I thought all the available one-letter .com domains cost hundreds of millions of dollars