There’s been a lot of buzz today about a new product launched by Amazon called Honeycode. If you, like most people, hopped over to Honeycode.com you might have been surprised to see the .COM domain forwarding to a .AWS domain name.
While I’ll probably write an article about Honeycode in the future as I think it’s a pretty interesting step forward in the “no-code” revolution, today I just want to highlight their use of .AWS.
When the new domain name extensions (or new gTLDs as the domain community calls them) were launched years ago, there was this idea that brands would all own their own extension. The idea here is that products and services would launch on a brand’s own domain extension rather than what we’ve seen happen historically which is <brand domain>.com/product/
As you’ve probably noticed, the whole concept didn’t take off and today 99.9% of brands launch a new product on the same .COM domain name they’ve been branding on since the dawn of the web.
What’s interesting about Amazon’s move today is that they do own the matching .COM for their product (which of course makes sense) but they’ve decided to forward it to a .AWS site showing a trend they might be kicking off. And, well, when Amazon kicks off a trend, other companies tend to follow.
That being said, I’ve never bought into the concept of brands using their own extension, so I’m going to say I think this will be a one-off by Amazon rather than the beginning of a new trend. Still, it’s an interesting move and I’ll definitely be watching to see if Amazon continues to brand new products, or move existing ones to .AWS domains.
What do you think? Do you agree with me, this is a one-off and we aren’t going to see other companies follow in Amazon’s footsteps, or do you think this could be a trend in the making?
