I thought I'd spend a few lines in irb and implement two.io for you right here in a comment ;-) Here are the available two letter io names from /usr/share/dict/words, /usr/bin commands, and bash builtins:
UPDATE: It just struck me that two letter domains might be rather hard to register. I'm looking at the T&Cs now. It is notable how many are marked as being registered in the WHOIS though.
UPDATE 2: Neither of the third party registrars I tried allowed two letter .io domains but the central nic.io does.
It's pretty rare a NIC allows two letter domains so it might be a general limitation, but they are possible. Either that, or our domain (ep) is just a very persistent hallucination.
Isn't everything? ;-) Thanks for the heads up. It does seem nic.io will do it but both Moniker and IWantMyName barfed on them.
I'm tempted but I already own "no.gd" (a rather undiscovered TLD if there were one - and they allow 2 letter domains!) and have little enough use for it already..
I also heard about .gg and .je (Guernsey and Jersey - British Crown Dependencies off of the French coast) which can be registered directly at http://www.channelisles.net/applic/application.shtml (but they handle them manually so you have to wait a few days).
This would be awesome if you could combine the list with availability of <xxx>io.com -- to know when you could get both the shorter <xxx>.io and the traditional .com
Honestly though, at least its a $100 to register. At that price hopefully it will deter a lot of squatters from buying up all the domains. "For GBP 60 (approx US$ 100) for year one and GBP 30 (approx US$ 50) per year thereafter." (http://www.nic.io/)
Sorry, I registered it. Once the process is finished it will join my nerd-flock and redirect to my professional site unless I decide to make something for it. :)
Two-letter ones are 'cooler' - we grabbed ep.io a few months back - but the NIC don't allow language or country codes as two letter domains, IIRC. Still, there's plenty left, as petercooper's comment says.
Seems like got.io would be kind of cool for someone specializing in high speed storage. Thanks for posting, I'm enjoying trying to come up with ideas based on the names alone.
Could you add a check for the name as a .com? For example, next to ace.io display "+.com" for available or "x .com" for unavailable.
[Edit: I noticed these are checked just once per day. Perhaps add a link to check the .com? As in,
ace.io 2011-02-15 (aceio.com?) with aceio.com linked to http://iwantmyname.com/search?domain=aceio.com ]
General question about anyones experience with domains that done end in .com
How hard coded is the .com extensions when it comes to the general public these days (your mom/uncle who just uses the internet to read email, if that much)? If you told someone your domain was foobar.io and you ask them to repeat the domain would they say foobario.com?
and those are just the ones that correspond to english words.
If every 2/3 letter combination were available as a tld, you would have 320,797,152 3-letter domains . . .
I'd like to see some kind of analysis of how many WORD.xx domains are actually in use, just to get an idea of whether the cyber-squatting market is due for a correction.
Hmm; they list Gandi as one of their registrars, but no .IO domains are shown in Gandi-originated searches. (Opening another $40/year account with a new, unfamiliar registry increases the effective cost of these domains significantly.)
$ for domain in `cat /usr/share/dict/* | perl -ne's/io$/.io/ && print lc if length == 6'` ; do whois $domain | grep "\- Available" ; done
Domain "DUR.IO" - Available
Domain "DUS.IO" - Available
Domain "FER.IO" - Available
Domain "GOB.IO" - Available
Domain "IDD.IO" - Available
Domain "KOK.IO" - Available
Domain "NGA.IO" - Available
Domain "PAP.IO" - Available
Domain "SOD.IO" - Available
Domain "TUR.IO" - Available
Domain "DUR.IO" - Available
Domain "DUS.IO" - Available
Domain "FER.IO" - Available
Domain "GOB.IO" - Available
Domain "IDD.IO" - Available
Domain "KOK.IO" - Available
Domain "NGA.IO" - Available
Domain "PAP.IO" - Available
Domain "SOD.IO" - Available
Domain "TUR.IO" - Available
ah.io, ay.io, di.io, ea.io, ey.io, fa.io, fc.io, fe.io, fg.io, ha.io, he.io, ju.io, ka.io, oe.io, or.io, ow.io, pu.io, ra.io, te.io, ti.io, tu.io, ut.io, wa.io, wi.io, wu.io, wy.io, ya.io, ym.io, yn.io, yr.io, du.io, ld.io, lp.io, m4.io, nm.io, wc.io
UPDATE: It just struck me that two letter domains might be rather hard to register. I'm looking at the T&Cs now. It is notable how many are marked as being registered in the WHOIS though.
UPDATE 2: Neither of the third party registrars I tried allowed two letter .io domains but the central nic.io does.
UPDATE 3: I visited rb.io (which I wanted ;-)) and found this blog post of just a cpl weeks ago on the same topic: http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/two-letter-io-domains-ava...