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Domain posts

Filed under: Odds and ends, TUAW Business

Happy 5th birthday (plus or minus a few months) TUAW!

While writing up a short post about Wolfram|Alpha yesterday, I decided to test the service by entering a few domain names to see what kind of results I would get. I typed in TUAW.com and Macworld.com, and was pleased to see a comparison of daily hit statistics, but what really surprised me was to find that the TUAW.com domain went online on June 16th, 2004. That, of course, makes us five years old today!

We contacted Scott McNulty and Laurie Duncan, two former TUAW editors, who filled us in on some details. The first "soft launch" TUAW post was actually made on January 27, 2004 by Jason Calacanis -- it has survived a number of design changes and can be viewed here. One of the earliest examples of real-world content is Sean Bonner's post here. So is Wolfram Alpha wrong? Not precisely: those early posts appeared under the "apple.weblogsinc.com" domain, which later migrated to TUAW.com.

What's happened in those five short years? The switch to Intel processors, Tiger, Leopard, the iPod nano, shuffle, and touch, and a little something called the iPhone. It's been a lot of fun for all of the bloggers who have been involved, and we hope that TUAW has been and will continue to be among your favorite sources for Apple news.

I'm curious -- what changes do you think we'll see in the next five years? Leave a comment below.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Internet, Apple, MobileMe

The real .mac opens up with new regulations

ICANN, the ruling body for Internet domain naming, has voted to relax a few rules that will supposedly open up a whole slew of top-level domain names, multiple news sources are reporting. They haven't exactly said why they're doing this, only that it will "preserve the security, stability, and global interoperability of the Internet." Which seems like a good reason, we guess. But whatever the reason, it's good news for people who don't want to use the old standbys of .com or .org -- now, bidding can start for .sex, .xxx, .post, or any other combination of letters.

Like, for example, .mac. Yes, for the first time in the history of the Internet, Apple would have been able to make good on its .Mac brand -- except that, as you know, they decided just a few weeks ago to change that brand to Mobile Me. Though we supposed mobile.me is probably out there somewhere.

Of course, as we've speculated before, the change to Mobile Me wasn't so much about domain names as it was about just getting away from the Apple brand, and creating a service that both Mac and PC users would be interested in. So odds are that Apple wasn't waiting for .mac anyway. But it is interesting that even though they can finally have it, they don't actually need it any more.

Thanks, Darcy L!

Filed under: Rumors, .Mac

Rumor: Me.com bought by Apple?

Over the weekend, the rumor mills went crazy with reports that Apple had bought a new domain name from their registrar (Mark Monitor). The domain name in question: me.com, which would agree with previous reports of Apple re-branding their .Mac service as "Mobile Me."

As we reported earlier it seems Apple is re-launching their .Mac service as an Exchange style service that might even be moving onto other mobile platforms as well as other OSes (including Windows).

As an additional reconfirmation of this rumor, the same tipster that told TUAW first about the .Mac refresh contacted us again to say that the rumors are in fact true. This is still solidly in the rumor category, but it is certainly shaping up to be an interesting WWDC.


[via MacRumors]

Filed under: iPhone

iPhone.com domain hit hard

iPhone.com, which is not owned by Apple, has been hit so hard today that the site has temporarily been shut down. Created in 1995, according to publicly available domain information, it is currently registered by Go Daddy. iPhone.org, however, is registered by Apple Computer and will redirect you to the iPhone page on the main Apple site--the one with the cool iPhone intro.

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