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Amazon's short URL: http://a.co

64 points| shawndumas | 12 years ago |a.co

61 comments

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[+] jere|12 years ago|reply
One of the main reasons I used short URLs before was twitter, but they shorten* all of them for you now.

*Unless the original URL is less than 22 characters, in which case they conveniently _lengthen_ it for you. Which includes many of the unshortened links I post. I even recently set up my blog so posts have a ~9 character permalink. So twitter would award me with about a dozen bonus characters.

[+] saurik|12 years ago|reply
I especially hate that behavior as occasionally I'm talking about a domain name (maybe one that is having a DNS issue), not a URL, and Teitter insists on making it a lengthened URL. I've seriously taken to putting zero-width space characters before the .com to break its detection.
[+] umsm|12 years ago|reply
What do people use short URLs for nowadays? I used to run one that was "dynamnic" in the sense that you had a number of services that it could resolve and specific data you would send the services. But it never gained traction.

/g/search+query /bing/search+query /amazon/product+search /g.images/image+search etc.

[+] Peroni|12 years ago|reply
As expected, Google own http://g.co and twitter own http://t.co yet http://f.co is available.
[+] RKearney|12 years ago|reply
Why would they need/want f.co? They already own fb.me. f.co is one letter shorter and isn't as easily identifiable as fb.me.
[+] hmart|12 years ago|reply
Look dk domain http://dk resolves even without the subdomain.How's that possible?
[+] stanleydrew|12 years ago|reply
Nothing special about a tld resolving. You can put an A record on anything. Many companies set up internal DNS names like "go" or "wiki" so that they resolve to helpful internal tools. This is like a public version of that.
[+] joeframbach|12 years ago|reply
The global top-level domain is a dot (.)

Point your browser to www.google.com. and it will resolve the same.

com. and net. and dk. are top-level domains, but still are "subdomains" under the global ".".

The administrator of the dk tld just pointed a dns record at it.

[+] niels|12 years ago|reply
It's owned by the danish top level register. I guess they just added a dns entry for that.
[+] fooyc|12 years ago|reply
The "to" TLD used to resolve to an URL shortener, producing http://to/xxx urls.

Now it still resolves, however the server doesn't accepts http connections anymore.

[+] petejansson|12 years ago|reply
The browser is automatically putting "www." in front of "dk" allowing it to resolve. Although the root DNS zone (the implied dot at the end of DNS names) can have A records in it, the current policy only allows A records for (some) nameservers. As a result, the new gTLD program, for example, does not currently allow "bareword domains" because you can't put an A record for the domain by itself in the root zone. (The policy doesn't allow an MX record, either, so email to someone@shop wouldn't be possible without a policy change.) The policy is aimed at keeping the root zone simple, and minimizing the volume of changes.
[+] axyjo|12 years ago|reply
Doesn't resolve for me.
[+] justplay|12 years ago|reply
working here , thanks for sharing .
[+] veesahni|12 years ago|reply
looks like overstock got http://o.co for $350,000 .. is that the ballpark price for a 1 character .co?
[+] scrapcode|12 years ago|reply
Are they required to report how much they paid for the domain? I'm interested in seeing numbers if anyone has them.
[+] drsintoma|12 years ago|reply
I was not aware that 1 character domains where possible until now. I wonder why they are restricted in most main TLDs.
[+] kijeda|12 years ago|reply
IANA blocked registration of most of them under gTLDs (.COM, .NET, etc.) in 1993, on the thought they may be useful to support extensibility of the DNS down the track. Country-code operators have typically followed that lead as good practice.

As they were never really used for that purpose, slowly but surely they have been released into circulation. The applications by registry operators to lift the one- and two-letter domain restrictions are at http://www.icann.org/en/resources/registries/rsep

[+] rz2k|12 years ago|reply
You can have zero character domain names. Briefly trying out a few of the country TLDs, the one for Anguilla works: http://ai. the trialing dot is not needed but helps tell your browser not to try to expand it further.

Many TLDs do not resolve, though many others resolve to the TLD's registrar's site.

[+] RKearney|12 years ago|reply
A TLD can have an A record, so in theory you could have a "0 character" domain. You could also use it for email, so a@co would be a valid email address if co. had an A or MX record associated with it.
[+] neya|12 years ago|reply
I guess it's all about the money. The fact the amazon could afford it and I nor you couldn't explains it better, I guess.
[+] mikeevans|12 years ago|reply
I'm not sure about any others except Google uses g.co for shortening their own URLs.

Edit: And Twitter uses t.co

[+] swalkergibson|12 years ago|reply
I have always wondered about x.com and how they got that domain. Does anyone around here know?
[+] alex_doom|12 years ago|reply
z.com used to go to a site for Nissan's Z