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by iand 4798 days ago
What's the attraction of the .io domain? Seeing it crop up in many places and I'm not sure what the significance is.
3 comments

I've just assumed that it tends to imply 'technology' via the long-existing term "I/O" [input/output].

Even the businesses that that use it and are less tech-heavy in business model tend to be web- and/or mobile-first type companies from what I've seen...

In addition to the "techiness" of io, a lot of the draw has been availability. They've been going at $50/yr for a while, which has kept the squatters away. Last time I looked, there were a plethora of three-letter English words available.

I jumped in in 2009, and basically had my pick of 2-letter domains.

There are less than 40 three letter word domains names available now. http://andio.herokuapp.com
$20 for the results of bash one-liner? (by my count there are far more than 40 left)

    for i in `egrep '^[a-z]{3}$' /usr/share/dict/words`
    do
      whois $i.io | grep -q '\- Available' && echo $i.io
    done
Heck, there's still a few two-letter .io domains left

    for i in {a..z}{a..z}.io
    do
      whois $i | grep -q '\- Available' && echo $i
    done

    iz.io
    jy.io
    kf.io
    kq.io
    lq.io
    qf.io
    qg.io
    qj.io
    qo.io
    qs.io
    qy.io
    uj.io
    yd.io
    yl.io
    yz.io
But, yeah, I agree, .io choices are getting a little thinner than they used to be.
Yes, $20 for you is too much, but there are lots of people who have no idea how to do a bash one-liner (me being one of them actually).

I worked on this project a while back and posted the list for free for over a year, not sure why it's a sin to charge money for it now.

Selling the remaining list is quite a smart idea. it obviously has value even though it would be relatively simple to figure out the remaining free domains on your own.
True, the task is not very difficult if you have a list of words to check against. If you're time to create your own list takes more than $19 of your time then its probably of some value to just buy mine :)
People treat it as though the io stands for input/output (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input/output).
I have yet to see an input/output related .io site
redis.io ?
sockets.io? aspen.io?

Just off the top of my head.