[tomchuk]

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.

[Gertig]

There are less than 40 three letter word domains names available now. http://andio.herokuapp.com

[tomchuk]

$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.

[Gertig]

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.

[kilian]

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.

[Gertig]

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 :)