Putting the Times’s First Email Address to Bed | Hacker News Reader

Putting the Times’s First Email Address to Bed

nytimes.com

101 pointsca98am7921 comments

In the article's comments section, a notable comment from the Peter Lewis mentioned in the article:

John, let the record show that The Times also initially turned down my free offer of the nytimes.com domain, which I had registered. A couple of years later they decided this internet thing was perhaps more than a fad, and demanded that I transfer ownership, which I willingly did. They still haven't reimbursed me for the registration fee :-)

shouldn't have transferred ownership. if they weren't treating the internet seriously, then their trademark likely didn't include a provision for it either

Quite sweet in way that in 94/95 the NYT had not a clue about mail when some businesses had been running it for well over a decade by that point.

Journalism is the art of explaining to others what you haven't really understood yourself...

Another way of saying that is that journalists are people who have questions.

I wouldn't say they had no clue about email. The NYT did in fact publish an article about email in 1990 [0].

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/13/us/some-computer-conversat...

I've always wondered why the Times' domain was nytimes.com rather than nyt.com or newyorktimes.com. nytimes.com seems like an odd mix of initials and spelling the words out.

This was a fascinating look into early internet history.

Also, it was pretty cool of Markoff to give the domain up in exchange for keeping his old email address, rather than holding the paper hostage for a bunch of money.

nyt.com does not mean anything, newyorktimes.com too long, nytimes just perfect, everybody knows what ny means.

sure it does, it means the new york times. the wall street journal uses wsj.com

In case you were wondering too, if you go to the browser bar and type in nyt.com right now you are, in fact, redirected to the nytimes.com website. How about that.

Why not switch to a .nyt TLD? Or .times?

Because it costs $185k, involves a bunch of work and infrastructure, and wouldn't really benefit them?

This. Also, most people just plainly do not understand the new TLDs yet; and sadly I don't think they will ever become mainstream anytime soon.

Deviate from .com .net .ca .org and most people become clueless. Especially when users are sending an email, try explaining name@newyork.times is simply the address when a user insists there's a typo and it's missing .com or equivalent. Unfortunately adding a www. before, say on a business card, to denote it's a web address is counter-intuitive in most cases as that just lengthens the domain when typically the reason why one would get/migrate to a new TLD is to shorten it/make it easy to remember.

Made worse by the fact that non-technical people DO make such errors with some frequency. I don't know how many times I've seen someone's email address as "www.joe@example.com" or "joe@example," even on printed material that you'd hope people would carefully proof-read.

My personal email is me at james aust.in, and its constantly a pain to read to people, especially over the phone. I started saying it as me at "me at james austin with a dot before the in", but eventually settled on "me at james aust dot in". Only way to get it on the first try.

IMO the latter sounds clearer to me. I think I'm pretty savvy but if I listened to the former on the phone I would have to take a second to parse it and then I would read back something like the latter to you to confirm I got it right.

Why would you, though? Especially when you only have one site.

(as an aside, there is a The Times newspaper in the UK and I'm sure many other places. I suspect ownership of .times would become a lot more bother than it was worth, very quickly)

I really wish that it had been times.ny.ny.us instead, but I guess it's all water under the bridge at this point.

If you're going to wish for that, then maybe it should have been:

   us.ny.ny.times

In other words, the entire domain name system should read left to right as top of hierarchy to bottom of hierarchy.

The destination is what people care about. Not where it sits in a hierarchy. Janet was rightfully killed off.

Articles like this make me miss the old nyt. It was so comforting to have a publication you could trust, a paper of record. Those days are long gone. Nowadays, the constant, desperate obsession with controlling and manipulating the narrative is just so icky.

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