Microsoft Using .MS TLD

mqudsi writes "Microsoft is using the .MS top-level domain, assigned to the Caribbean island of Montserrat, for its Web 2.0-flavored Popfly project. You can get your own .MS name if you really want to — there are no restrictions on foreign ownership — at $180 US for 2 years. As of this writing microsoft.ms is available." In an obliquely related note, TechBlorge has up a rumination on the resemblance of the Popfly logo to Tux.

why not?

[WrongMonkey]

Why don't major corporations have their own TLDs as part of the system? It would cut back on a lot of phishing and ICANN doesn't seem to be reluctant to do whatever they can to make a buck.

was too spooked to login

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to try that popfly service this morning and when the passport login showed it was going to route to a weird .ms ccTLD, I thought, no way, this has to be some kind of scam, someone has hacked passport to send them passwords...

A modest request when using a wierd country code

[Animats]

When you use some country domain that's not really the country you're in, put the real country name after the postal mailing addresses on your web site. Wrong country domains screw up systems that are trying to locate your business for local search purposes. If your domain is under ".WS" (Western Samoa) or ".TO" (Tonga), you may be mapped into the middle of the Pacific Ocean. (There are Tongan web sites [www.tcc.to] in ".TO". Admittedly, ".TV" is unlikely to lead to a real web site in Tuvalu, and does tend to be handled as a special case.)

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[MarkRose]

There are a surprising amount of words that end in "ms". /usr/share/dict/american-english contains almost 500. Some are interesting in that the part preceding "ms" is also a word: Ada(ms) Nazis(ms) Si(ms) balsa(ms) boo(ms) char(ms) condo(ms) e(ms) far(ms) fir(ms) for(ms) ha(ms) hare(ms) he(ms) hi(ms) is(ms) la(ms) mini(ms) mode(ms) mu(ms) nor(ms) oh(ms) pal(ms) per(ms) pro(ms) real(ms) rear(ms) sea(ms) see(ms) ski(ms) spas(ms) tea(ms) tee(ms) thru(ms) to(ms) tote(ms) war(ms) ya(ms) and zoo(ms).

Re:Popfly?

[mr_man]

At Microsoft, Program Managers are not "Managers" in the traditional sense. Instead these people spec out the different features a product will have.

In Microspeak they are individual contributors and not managment, they don't have reports.

Having a strong team of program managers is a good thing for a developer. You get to spend more time focusing on the techncial implementation.

Re:OMG PONIES

[hobo sapiens]

If I get this post on metamod.pl, I'll roast the moderator who modded this informative.

Watching drunk people can be funny. Listening to drunk people can get annoying. Reading the ramblings of drunk people is just lame. Grousing about it by posting something in response is just a waste of time.

I guess I'll stop typing now.

Re:Popfly?

[Oswald]

Props for having the stones to use a name like MSFTVet on /. but come on:

The team is a small band of folks with a passion for democratizing development, housed within Microsoft's Developer Division based in Redmond, Washington. Like most startup ventures, the team hustles for resources every day and is innovative, scrappy, and fun. Oh, and we also dream big.

That's just sad. Women, men, motorcycles, music, sports, dogs, horses, science fiction (back when it was worth a shit), Smalltalk, dancing...these are just a few of the things people can be passionate about. Democratizing development, whateverthefuckthatmeans, is not on the list. Smells like marketing to me.

White boys should not try to talk like they grew up in the hood, lesbians should not piss standing up, and corporations with US$50 thousand million in the bank should not try to act "scrappy". All of these acts display a combination of confusion, dishonesty, and poor taste. It's no sin to be bigger than God; just don't try to act like you're too cool to suffer the ill effects.

This is not a criticism of the people on the team because I can't possibly know anything about the people on the team (well, I know that Aaron Brethorst turned his last name into a verb, which is pretty creepy, but we'll let that slide). I'm criticizing Microsoft management for thinking they can pull this off. They're off to a great start, with 9 managers and 6 developers.

It doesn't matter if Popfly [isn't a popfly usually an out in baseball, btw?]is a cool app or not, because it will go away. If it's cool now, then it will be exploited by MS in some off-putting way as soon as it gets remotely popular, and if it's not cool then having a rich daddy won't help it.

On a positive note, the website makes pretty nice use of color.

Re:why not?

[jd]

Well, as I understand it, the theory of having the .com domain is that the corporation buys their name and puts in subdomains below it. So, you might have cornflakes.kellogs.com, for example. One corporation, one namespace. Makes things very simple. The problem with moving the corporations to top-level is that they'll do exactly the same thing they did with .com, which is pollute the namespace as much as possible. At which point, the whole system becomes totally unworkable and unusable.

I'd personally prefer it if the .com domain was cleared of all products, individuals, trademarks and other superfluous crap. If you aren't a company, you aren't a .com. If you're an organization, you're an .org, and that's final. In fact, I'd go one further - anything that is directly off a .com, .org, .net or .gov should be international in some respect. If it's more local than that, the name should reflect that. (For example, I would exile the US Government to .gov.us, the same way most other governments do their websites. There should be no exceptions.) When something expands in scope, it can always buy the name for the next scope out.

Wouldn't this impinge on privacy, freedom, etc? Not really. Whilst governments should be honest about location (I can dream - they're rarely honest about anything else), the only constraint I'm suggesting is that the type of name should reflect the type of scope. If you're running a website for a metropolitan area, I'd say you should have a metropolitan-level domain name. Doesn't have to be the same metro, the same country or (when NASA gets round to it) even the same planet. This gives people plenty of room for satirical/joke names, etc. It just adds a few more dots to it. Big deal.

It'd be almost trivial to make the DNS hierarchy deeper. Most users would be unaffected as most people outside of the US already add country codes to the names and as far as US users are concerned, Slashdot is an international forum. Everything else you get to through links.

This really would help for domain spoofing, because when unicode domain names start to come online, it will be possible to generate visually identical domain names that are physically different. That's been the claimed problem all along, although since browsers have a language attribute, I don't see why the browser can't just recode names for your language anyway. However, apparently that is a no-no. Given that, I can't see why you can't validate that the string uses a consistent character set AND a character set that the user has pre-approved for use with the country-code that I'm arguing should be there in most cases. In such a system, spoofing names should be impossible.

Re:That'll make you cringe

[Zantetsuken]

So is it supposed to be the new way to create a myspace page or something? Is this MS admitting that their "LIVE" campaign is failing?

Re:Popfly?

[notaprguy]

I agree with most of what you said. It's like trying to be cool when you're not or, even if you are cool, you can't say you are or...you're not cool. What I don't really agree with is the criticism of them saying they want to democratize development. Maybe "democratize" wasn't the best choice of words but I think there's something cool about trying to make computing and development more accessible. I think one of the reasons the uber eggheads have such a hard time with Microsoft (beyond some bad behavior a few years back) is that they feel threatened by them. MSFT created VB because they wanted to make it easier to write apps for Windows than using C. Sure, C is a more elegante' and powerful way to write apps but VB was easy enough that anybody would put together a decent Windows app. Despite what some may think, Microsoft has generally forced prices of computing down, making it more accessible to everyone. Sure, today you can get good software for nothing but overall Microsoft software is and has always been cheaper than most commercial alternatives. But I digress. Popfly seems to be about making it easy for anyone to make simple little Web apps. It's a step in the right direction as far as I'm concerned. Even if it does make nervous the people who like to feel superior to everyone else b/c they have more technical knowledge.

Re:Per Industry TLD's

[matts-reign]

somehow apple.mus.com and apple.comp.com remind me of usenet newsgroups...... Are we moving forwards or backwards here? Which way should we be moving? Did usenet have a better idea than the web, in organizational terms?

Re:OMG PONIES

[Space cowboy]

Dunno about the ponies, but OpenStep (sort of) runs on Windows and gives you all the ObjC goodness you're being deprived of, and there's also The cocotron [cocotron.org]. All this can be found at the wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org] which also does a half-decent job of explaining what it is that makes Cocoa so nice to use.

What the Wikipedia article misses is the simplicity of the language - it's just about right, not the "You want to shoot off your foot ? Here have a howitzer!" of C++ nor the "well, we have a penknife. It's a bit rusty" of plain old 'C'. Any C program compiles without error under ObjC because ObjC is a formal superset of 'C', but you still get all the nice messaging/objects/categories/interfaces of a proper object-orientated language. With ObjC/Cocoa, it's hard *not* to write a decently-designed (probably M-V-C) application.

It may not have a "common runtime language", but you can (try to) prise ObjC/Cocoa out of my cold dead hands. Betcha can't.

Simon.

Re:That'll make you cringe

[pasamio]

Now what I loved was all of the managers:
1x Group Program Manager
5x Program Manager (one of which is the token female)
1x Product Manager
1x Product Unit Manager
1x Engineering Manager
1x Test Developer
5x Developers

Or to reduce it to developers and managers: 5x Developers vs 10x Managers - I wonder who the three people missing are? No wonder Microsoft have issues shipping product, 1:2 dev to manager ratio is insane!

Re:That'll make you cringe

[pchan-]

They have more program manager than they have developers.
Haha, yes, this is what I noticed, too.

They have NINE managers and SIX developers. They probably sit in meetings all day just like the rest of Microsoft. Actually, I found the whole page hilarious, due to its forced-sounding attempt at being cool. Sounds like it was written by the same people that did the Zune marketing. Notice the contradiction between the two sentences of being right in the center of Microsoft while being a "startup".

The team is a small band of folks with a passion for democratizing development, housed within Microsoft's Developer Division based in Redmond, Washington. Like most startup ventures, the team hustles for resources every day and is innovative, scrappy, and fun. Oh, and we also dream big.

Re:is bluescreenofdeath.ms available?

[Soruk]

A UK-based Linux-friendly ISP advertises using the URL sod.ms [sod.ms]...

The screencast is interesting - sort of

[Qbertino]

The screencast [microsoft.com] shows live object/entity linking through a bloated RIA interface that probably needs a 3 GHz CPU and a 400$ GFX card to render properly. Let alone an MS operating system and their bloated, insecure, barely beta and closed-source proprietary silverthingie stuff.
The rotating entitiy cubes are pointless, anoying and distracting and are probably just there to hide the fact that we are basically looking at a RIA case tool with a restricted featureset. Everybody knows that things are going this way, but I doubt MS will get all things right to capture a larger audience and developer base.
Meanwhile I'm sticking with Laszlo [openlaszlo.org] for true cross-plattform RIA developement. After all even Adobe Flex is scrambling to catch up with them. And Laszlo went completely open source way before anybody else.