These are my thoughts on product, tech and design.

There's been a lot of chatter lately about the future of the .io ccTLD. The top-level domain was originally created as a country code top-level domain for the "British Indian Ocean Territory", but like history tells us, countries are not forever and that means ccTLDs aren't either. Should a treaty by the UK government be passed, the islands would become part of Mauritius, ending the need for the .io domain.

The rules for ccTLDs are strict, and if a country doesn't exist in the official international specification of country code short codes, the domain can't either. The only other option would be for the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to break its own rules, but seeing as how they say, "we are not in the business of deciding what is and what is not a country" it certainly feels like a tall ask.

But that's not stopping people from hoping for it. The latest rumor, or perhaps coping mechanism, is that IANA and ICANN could still have a change of heart about the rules and instead reclassify .io domains into a generic top-level domain as a way to preserve it. That would still be quite unprecedented considering two-letter domains have historically been reserved exclusively for ccTLDs.

If I was a .io domain owner (btw, I'm not), and I established a presence on a .io domain, I'd be looking to migrate any production systems off the .io namespace and quickly change any hard-coded references. While potential changes aren't the same as actual changes, the business risk is simply too high to ignore even if the timeline is at least 5 years. Companies like Itch.io and the numerous mobile games who made .io part of their brand however, should also start those transitions ASAP.

The issue really does go beyond just .io domains. I've come to believe that I could never feel truly secure putting my business on almost any country code Top-Level Domain (ccTLD). Let me explain why with a few eye-opening examples:

1. The deletion of a country

   One of the oldest and most illustrative examples of the potential instability ccTLDs can face is the case of .yu, the former ccTLD for Yugoslavia. This domain was officially allocated in 1989 but much of its existence was uncertain following a bloody civil war and the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. The domain managed to persist through various political changes but was finally deleted in 2010.

   "With the deletion of .yu, historians and researchers lost access to websites that contained important historical records. Gone are firsthand accounts of the NATO bombing and the Kosovo War; the mailing lists that scientists used to update their colleagues on the progress of the conflict; nostalgic forums and playful virtual nation experiments."

   From "Yugoslvia's Digital Twin"

2. "Who do you think? The Libyans."

   In 2010, the popular URL shortener Bitly found itself in a precarious situation. They were using Libya's .ly ccTLD and nearly had their domain held hostage by then-dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Bitly ultimately escaped the scrutiny but Libya's domain registry didn't go as easy on others, seizing and shutting down other .ly domains that linked to content they found objectionable, including adult content and depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.

   "This is deeply concerning for everyone, but especially .ly domain owners, because it sets a precedent that all websites running on a .ly domain must comply with Libyan Islamic/Sharia Law in order to maintain their domains. This is especially concerning for anyone running a url shortener or hosting user-generated content on a .ly domain."

   From "The .ly domain space to be considered unsafe"

3. Seized AF

   A decade after the Bitly incident, it seems this lesson still needs to be learned by protocols and platforms too. One group had a very tongue-in-cheek .af domain (Afghanistan's ccTLD), and were quite aware of the risks involved, but they still found their users homeless when their domain was seized without warning by the Taliban. This incident exposed a critical gap in ActivityPub and Mastodon: there's no way to migrate an entire instance to a new domain. While the servers and data still existed, the domain was the most crucial part of hoaw users' identities are resolved on the Fediverse. Consequently, users were forced to start over with zero followers, highlighting how even decentralized platforms can fail due to ccTLD instability.

   “We were very much aware that the .AF TLD belonged to Afghanistan and that there were potential upsets in the future,” they added. “In some strange ways, that made it more appealing —we knew that there were ways that this community experiment could end that were outside of our control, and not just due to us burning out or similar.”

   From "Taliban Shuts Down 'queer.af' Domain, Breaking Mastodon Instance"

The crux of the matter is this: neither IANA nor ICANN can control what countries do with the ccTLDs they've been assigned. While these domains might offer clever branding opportunities or seem innocuous, history has shown us time and again that they can become liabilities overnight.

For businesses and critical online services, the risks far outweigh any potential benefits. A domain name isn't just a web address, it's the foundation of your digital identity and your online home. Losing it can mean losing everything you've built: your hard-earned SEO rankings, years of accumulated backlinks, and the trust and recognition you've established with your audience.

So, no matter how tempting or trendy a ccTLD might be, I can't in good conscience recommend using them for canonical URLs, or really anything besides a redirect. When it comes to your online presence, it's far better to prioritize stability and security over cleverness or novelty. It might seem boring, but this is precisely why .COM remains king.

Yesterday Apple announced the new Vision Pro spatial computer (aka headset). One of the things I do at my job is kind of try to predict the future, or at least imagine how to get ahead of it so we can make the right moves today. With that, I've been assembling some predictions (most of which I assume will be proven wrong very quickly) on how I think the Vision Pro will change the current state of product, experiences and technology. They are:

• This new platform is gonna bring a new monetization strategy with it. This isn’t the place for 99¢ apps, especially when every user has shown their willingness to spend and user base is small. Pricing will look more like Mac apps, or perhaps higher. Subscriptions will be the norm, or perhaps pay per hour/day for certain kinds of apps.

• Entertainment is obviously a big part of this and VR events (court-side sports & front-row concerts) could be a game-changer. It has the chance to be a big disruptor to live sports so I’m predicting a Ticketmaster-like entity might sell expensive per-event ticketed access so VR doesn’t undercut in-person.

• Streamers like Netflix and Disney are going to add VR/AR content to their libraries but put it behind a higher tier plan. Apple will raise the price of Apple TV+ but will still have some of the cheapest access to VR content and it will all be Vision Pro exclusive.

• Zeiss lenses are going to be expensive for people who need them. DTC third parties like Warby Parker will probably replicate something pretty equivalent very quickly.

• 3D photos and videos will be more interesting and more used than Live Photos, but not by much. 3D photos and videos will also be in a new Apple format that is not widely supported for a while.

If I think of more, I'll probably update this post. And if any of them are every confirmed or disproven I'll try to remember and update those too.

A few months ago I started writing a blog post that is probably never gonna get finished and so this is my attempt to rewrite it while it’s relevant and force myself to finish.

When I graduated college, my parents gifted me an iPad and I was super excited. I’d wanted an iPad since it launched but I didn’t really know what I’d use it for other than the fact that I just love technology and cool toys. (Small tangent: The model they got me was the 3rd generation version and it was also the last one to use the 30 pin connector. It was actually replaced nine months later when Apple launched the iPhone 5 and the Lightning port and I’m still bitter than Apple made it obsolete so fast.) Anyways, I was so stoked to have an iPad but I had no idea what to do with it.

I tried to write blogs and essays on it, but it felt weird. Trying to type on a large virtual keyboard just wasn’t satisfying. I tried again, writing with a Bluetooth keyboard in this weird origami-style case that propped everything up, but that just also felt weird. I tried drawing with it, but I’m not much of an artist, especially when it comes to drawing with my finger. I also tried watching a fair amount of TV on it, including The Newsroom and the first season of Game of Thrones using the HBO Go app. It was fine, but I had other devices better suited for that.

Overall, I was pretty underwhelmed by my iPad. It felt like there was supposed to be something more than just big iPhone apps and watching TV. Because the truth was, I didn’t even like the big iPhone apps. I wanted something that was better than what I might even get on my phone and maybe that killer iPad app wasn’t even available as an iPhone app.

There was one kind of app in particular that kind of got me excited: second-screen apps. The idea is that while you’re watching live television you open an app that is connected to what you’re watching and it gives you a separate but connected and interesting layer on which to look at your TV watching experience. For example, there might be a game or trivia or a Q&A happening while you’re watching a show or stats and alternate camera angles while watching sports. However, the second-screen apps that popped up barely scratched the surface of what was theoretically possible. They tried to be incrementally better versions of existing things (live TV guide, entertainment reviews, social feeds) just fine tuned for monetization.

My first attempt at writing this went deep into the mistakes that were made by the apps that went after this, and rather than go in depth here's a summary:

• Browsing another social platform is more work, and the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.
• Your TV already had a guide that worked just fine.
• Social-graph entertainment recommendations are trash. The likes and preferences of my Facebook friends vary GREATLY and cannot predict what I will like.
• TV viewers want fewer ads, not more. There is not a person alive who would say, “I sure wish I could access some targeted advertainment content from GE while watching The Voice.”
• No matter what these social TV apps tried, Twitter and Facebook had more conversations happening on their platforms.
• But, perhaps the worst crime of all, was this: most synchronized second-screen content was lame, phoned-in and distracting. Trivia that was either far too easy or far too hard, Q&As that only had a few answers to questions that felt super screened or even planted, and “exclusive” content that wasn’t remotely interesting (a set photo, trailer for the next episode, wallpaper downloads). By the nature of it being optional, it was often worthless. If the content was valuable enough, it’d be on the first screen.

I say all that because I really just want hit the nail on the head with a giant hammer. Here goes: you can build cool shit, but you need to solve a problem.

Social TV apps were a solution in search of a problem. These startups were able to convince VCs that people were already using their phones, laptops and tablets in front of their TVs — so why not serve up ads on those devices related to the content shown on the TV screen? But that wasn’t a problem users experienced - it was just an opportunity to exploit users's desire to connect with fellow fans and their favorite shows. Targeted advertising is not, and will never be, a feature users care about, so building your product to suit your monetization strategy instead of your users is how to fail fast.

—

So why did I want to hurry up and write this now? Well, it is the eve of another major Apple announcement. Tomorrow we night finally know what Apple’s plans for virtual reality/augmented reality are, and people are going to think they should start building apps/experiences for this new device the way that they did for the iPad and for the Apple Watch.

I have two responses to that.

1. First mover advantage for apps is bullshit. The market is unforgiving to underbaked ideas so spend time getting it right.
2. Build a user-focused product. If you build a product that is valuable to your business but not the users, they won’t use it.

This sounds so basic, so why did second screen apps get it so wrong? The short answer is that the world was in the middle of a digital transformation. People were increasingly more likely to get entertainment through a digital means, and that meant that there was suddenly a giant pot of money if you could use some kind of attribution technology to demonstrate return on ad spend. These second-screen app people thought this was wonderful. They could marry the traditional advertising technology to the digital. Except one problem: interactive advertising does not solve a user problem and so it was a huge fucking flop.

The peak of this kind of thinking was around the time of Apple’s “there’s an app for that” campaign. An article on Vox asks the right question, “do we really need an app for everything?” The answer is of course not.

Yet someone is going to do this again if they buy into the hype cycle of AR and ship before they have an effective product with a complete UX that fulfills a need for a user. The hype cycle isn’t inherently bad. The hype cycle is basically a natural phenomenon. What’s bad is trying to shoehorn poorly thought out ideas and even worse monetization strategies into a product users definitely don't and won't value.