.Guru, .Bike, .Singles And 4 Other Domain Names Have Launched

If you are looking for a good domain name, your choices are about to get alot more interesting. Starting today you can register a .bike, .clothing, .guru, .holdings, .plumbing, .singles and .ventures domain name through numerous domain name registrars worldwide. Last year, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) already made four new gTLDs in Arabic, Chinese and Cyrillic scripts available, but this is the first time new gTLDs will become available in Latin characters.

The domains that are rolling out this week were delegated to Donuts Inc., the largest of the registries for the new domain names. In total, Donuts applied for 304 gTLDs and is now under contract for just over 100 of the new gTLDs. Next week, for example, users will be able to register .camera, .equipment, .estate, .gallery, .graphics, .lighting and .photography. Going forward, the company plans to roll out new names on a weekly basis.

As Donuts’ VP for communications and industry relations Mason Cole has said, the new names will be available “as soon as someone registers the name and sets the nameservers to point to the site. That could happen as early as tomorrow.” Donuts, for example, was permitted to register nic.bike for itself and it’s already pointing to the company’s homepage today.

Continuing on weekly for most of 2014, Donuts will roll out additional gTLDs. Next Wednesday, February 5, .CAMERA, .EQUIPMENT, .ESTATE, .GALLERY, .GRAPHICS, .LIGHTING and .PHOTOGRAPHY will be open for registration by anyone interested in an online identity connected to these new domain names.

Users who are interested in buying these names will be able to head to a number of registrars, including the likes of GoDaddy, Web.com and 1&1, to register the domain names.

If the earlier rollout of .info, .aero, .jobs and similar new domains is any indication, it’ll take a very long time for anybody to warm up to many of these new names. On the other hand, though, we’ve seen a fair share of companies that now use .io, .ly, .co and .fm, so these new names may just have a shot. For the most part, though, I expect that many people will register these domain names and then point them to their existing .com addresses. Let’s see!