Dot XYZ is getting a little love this morning from the Los Angeles BizJournals.com website. Annlee Ellingson got some quotes from Daniel Negari for the story and there were also some mentions of those who have switched to a .xyz like GroovyWebDesign.com.
From the article:
We’ve positioned ourselves as the next .com,” he told me.
XYZ, he said, is generic. The domain endings that we’re used to — .com and .org, for example — are abbreviations of English words (in this case, “commercial” and “organization”) that mean little in other languages. XYZ, on the other hand, is “really kind of universal. It transcends different languages,” Negari told me.
“XYZ is the last three letters of the alphabet. It’s really kind of natural and instinctive to me that you end the alphabet with XYZ, you should end a domain name the same way.”
Negari’s company is targeting the “next-generation Internet user — that small business that’s coming online for the first time or startup,” he said. “They’re looking for a good, memorable short name.”
Other prominent .xyz users include Place.xyz, the rebranded home of the Lady Gaga-backed Backplane, which builds brands standalone social networks like Gaga’s LittleMonsters.com.
The article goes on to mention what I think has been the best exposure for .XYZ and that is it’s usage on the hit HBO comedy Silicon Valley. Daniel Negari is quoted as saying, The shout-out was a promotional boost for XYZ that Negari didn’t see coming.
“I had no idea until it aired and my phone blew up from all of the people text-messaging me,”
Read the full article on BizJournals.com
The exposure that Negari has achieved for .xyz should be instructive for Donuts and for Rightside. He has managed to get some major media exposure through a lot of initiative. There’s no reason that these other companies could not enjoy the same publicity. Same with Neustar and .us who could also benefit from more active publicity efforts.
Usually when referring to the next big thing there has to be some real innovation or change, which I can’t seem to distinguish what technology .xyz offers that .com does not.
But it is great marketing.
Another reason to invest in Negari! Great marketer!
Great publicity for .XYZ, Daniel and the new TLD revolution. One correction is needed however, .Com does NOT stand for commercial, it stands for commerce as in international for profit commerce. Ironically most people don’t even know what .com stands for which makes this story on .xyz even more compelling. If you ask a room full of domainers, 50% will not know what .com means or what it was initially intended for.
How can we update https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.com and https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1591.txt to mention “Commerce” instead of “Commercial”?
Network Solutions was the original registry for .com – they have the correct info in Wikipedia about what .com was intended for: Registry and registrar business
Network Solutions, Inc. (NSI) first operated the domain name system (DNS) registry under a sub-contract with the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) in September 1991. NSI gave out names in .com, .org, .mil, .gov, .edu and .net for free, along with free Internet Protocol (IP) address blocks. This work was performed at the Chantilly offices of GSI, the primary contractor, a corporation formed by Infonet to avoid foreign ownership of U.S. government contracts.[citation needed] The Network Information Center at SRI International had performed the work under Elizabeth J. Feinler since 1972.[15]
In 1992, NSI was the sole bidder on a grant from the National Science Foundation to further develop the domain name registration service for the Internet. In 1993,[3] NSI was granted an exclusive contract by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to be the sole domain name registrar for .com (commerce), .net (network) and .org (organization) Top Level Domain (TLD) names, a continuation of work NSI had already been doing.[16] NSI also maintained the central database of assigned names called WHOIS. A contract was given to Boeing to operate the .mil registry, and was also performed by NSI under subcontract.
I brought the error up to Verisign a few times and it looks like they did correct or add commerce to what .com meaning was. Looks like they recently fixed it.