Once upon a time, single-letter domain names. with a few exceptions, were set aside due to concerns that the central .com registry may have to be split to handle the volume. Since we now know that the DNS servers can handle more than 40 million domain names without a problem, ICANN is considering making single-letter domain names available to the public. The question, however, is how to go about it.
"Obviously this is a valuable commodity," said Kurt Pritz, ICANN"s vice-president for business operations. Some have likened it to opening Central Park in NYC to developers.
It is expected that single-letter domains, if sold at auction, would be worth in excess of US$100,000 each. At the moment, only Quest Communications (q.com), Paypal (x.com) and Nissan Motors (z.com) have single-letter .com domain names but Yahoo has already applied for a trademark on y.com even though it is not yet available.
Single-letter domain names could be available as soon as next year. In addition to .com domains, it is expected that ICANN will also consider making single-letter .net and .org domains available.
Whats changed?
The immediately noticeable changes are that we are running Invision Power Board 2.1.3 and the v3.9 design has been revamped, codenamed Swift the new design removes a lot of the nested tables present in the 2001 v3.0 design here at Neowin.net.
Most of the changes are in the code, but we also made huge improvements to the layout and underlying css.
The server layout has changed too. We now use 1 dedicated server for MySQL data and 2 for Apache, the 4th does DNS, web and pop email.
Marcel (Redmak) has also coded a new news script backend and the design was updated there aswell, making the page lighter and more responsive overall.
The neowin 5 theme is not completed yet, due to the fact that staff have day jobs and the recent thanksgiving holiday halted development there temporarily, its next on the list. The most important thing is to have a working situation we can move to and I"m confident the updates will be sufficient while we finish up the new design on the new servers.