Google makes its .NEW domain extension available to the world, will it catch on?

In case you missed the memo, last year Google rolled out the .NEW domain extension as a way to easily create new Google Docs. Even though I remember reading about this, I quickly forgot and don’t think I ever tried it out. The concept is pretty simple though, rather than going to Google Docs or Google Sheets and creating a new Doc, or Sheet, you could go to sheet.new and poof – there’s a new Google Sheet a few seconds of your life back.

From what I can tell, this never really took off but it was a creative idea for a way to put a new domain name extension to work.

Now Google has decided to roll out .NEW to the rest of the world so other people can try their hand at using a domain extension to perform a specific action, in most cases creating a new document or video.

The domains are designed to get users straight to the action. That is, instead of having to visit a service, sign in, then find the right menu or function, they could just start creating.

However, some of today’s new domains aren’t quite as seamless as Google’s own. Because most Google Docs users are already signed in to Google, it’s easy to jump right to creating a new online document.

But other services aren’t used as often. That means Medium’s “story.new” doesn’t let you immediately start writing your blog post, unless you’re already signed in to Medium. If not, it drops you on a “Join Medium” sign-up page instead. This doesn’t make it necessarily any easier to use Medium — a better use case would have allowed the user to just start writing, saving their text under a temporary account, then prompt them to join Medium upon exit or clicking “publish.”(Source – TechCrunch)

I don’t mean to rain on the parade but I’m going to have to put my hand up and guess that this is something that’s just not going to take off. While I applaud Google for trying to find innovative new uses (no pun intended) for new domain extensions – this seems like a habit change that’s probably not going to catch on.

Google is pretty famous for trying lots of things and killing most of them off. IMO there’s nothing wrong with this, innovation is hard and the reality is you do have to try a lot of things until you get something that actually takes off. Google has the resources to try lots of things and yes, they find out that most of the things they try don’t work, but let’s be honest, the things that have worked have made Google one of the most successful technology companies in the world…so I think the formula is working.

If you want to take a look at all the projects Google has killed, there’s a site dedicated to it at KilledByGoogle.com. As many of you know, I’ve tried a lot of different experiments on my blog and killed most of them. I’m all for experimenting and learning from mistakes, continuing to iterate and try new things until something sticks.

So once again, while I think it’s awesome that Google’s experimenting with new ways to use domain name extensions…I think we’ll see this on the “Killed By Google” site in the future.

What do you think? Will .NEW catch on? I want to hear from you, comment and let your voice be heard!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton