Twitter, the highly popular microblog website, last week began recognizing some generic TLDs (gTLDs). It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the move for ICANN’s New gTLD Program.
When a user types something like “nic.berlin” or “fire.plumbing” in a tweet, Twitter will automatically turn it into a clickable link. However, at this point the new service only applies to TLDs delegated on February 5 or earlier, and those delegated over the last four weeks do not get clickable links in Twitter. It seems like these domains will have to wait for a while.
Nevertheless, the news received an enthusiastic response form the Internet community. Analysts note that if new gTLDs don’t look like web addresses, there’s going to be a big barrier to adoption, as nobody wants to have to copy-paste URLs, while many users would not recognize them as URLs at all.
Support for new gTLDs is a big step forward, especially from such a major player as Twitter.
