Author: Mike Nardine
They are both heirs apparent; Prince Charles is waiting for the Throne of England to become vacant, and Dot Biz has been waiting for people to give up on Dot Com and start registering their commercial domains with it. Originally created in 2001 along with Aero, Pro, Name, Coop, Museum and Info, Biz was specifically targeted at companies big and small but mostly small that couldn’t get the Com they wanted.
If blogs and other Internet entries from that period are any indication, it was originally thought to be a shoe-in to replace Com. They believed small companies would jump at the chance to use an extension as memorable and easily identifiable with the commercial world as Biz appeared to be. Even in those days the older Top Level Domain, Dot Com, was rapidly exhausting the ability of the English Language to supply it with meaningful names.
Apparently the pundits were wrong. By 2008 less than two million domain names had been registered using the extension Biz. It was the tenth most popular domain extension with less than a twentieth of the names reserved for Com and less than half those reserved for Info.
What happened? Who knows? Who cares, because sooner or later the English Throne will become vacant and Com will become effectively useless for newcomers. It approaches that point now. Both have taken longer than expected but the time draws nigh.
Biz is still as easily identifiable with business as Com is with commercial. Biz is still easy to remember. And as of this date Biz has a lot more room for individuals and small businesses to maneuver. I checked a few of the domain names that interest me against the data base: TheBookReviewer was available; EbooksEreaders was available. I even found five-letter words like Dufus.Biz available (doofus was already taken; but wouldn’t you prefer dufus, it being shorter?). There were still some four letter names available for use as acronyms (I found spjf and oasn; there must be many more). You can forget four-letter acronyms with Com.
Believe me, it’s a whole lot less frustrating to fill in the search box with Biz as the extension. And Biz is priced competitively with Com, unlike some of the Country Code TLDs. So give some thought to Biz. Even if you already own the Com of your dreams it might not be a bad idea to think about name space protection. I mean would you want a Dufus.Biz competing someday with your Dufus.Com? (my apologies to the real owner of this excellent domain name).
For the original article go to: http://bit.ly/gxaR5e