Latest news of the domain name industry

Recent Posts

Twitter starts supporting (some) new gTLDs

Kevin Murphy, March 7, 2014, 22:29:42 (UTC), Domain Tech

Twitter has started recognizing new gTLDs on its web page and on Tweetdeck.
As of some point in the last 48 hours, you can type something like “nic.berlin” or “fire.plumbing” in a tweet and Twitter will automatically turn it into a clickable link.
The switcheroo seems to have happened in the last two days, as this conversation may illustrate.
But there seems to be some delay — about a month, by my reckoning — in the support.
Domains such as nic.sexy, which is in a TLD delegated November 14, become clickable, but domains in more recent delegations such as .okinawa, which hit the root on Wednesday, are not.
Going back through the DI PRO Calendar, it seems that any TLD delegated on February 5 or earlier gets clickable links in Twitter and those delegated over the last four weeks do not.
I’m not sure why TLDs delegated in the last month are not supported, but I imagine it could be an annoyance during registries’ pre-launch marketing.
It’s difficult to overestimate how important application support is for the new gTLD program.
If new gTLDs don’t look like web addresses, there’s going to be a big barrier to adoption. A .link domain that isn’t clickable isn’t much use and nobody wants to have to copy-paste URLs.
Support for new gTLDs for Twitter’s 232 million active users is a big step along the road to universal acceptance of all TLDs, which ICANN has identified as a problem.



Tagged: , ,

Comments (2)

  1. Acro says:

    I come from an era where we typed in software as entire pages in hex to compile it, so a URL isn’t a biggie. 😀 But I agree, all valid gTLD addresses should be parsed as active links.

  2. David says:

    I have tried to add my site to twitter but it is not recognizing the tld .singles why are twitter behind everybody else

Add Your Comment