Google grabs slice of interwebs for EVERYONE (who speaks Japanese) Google has announced its first successful move into new gTLDs with the launch of .みんな for the Japanese market. The registration is the world’s first open top-level domain in hiragana, one of the three scripts used to read and write Japanese, according to the web giant. Written in the Roman alphabet as “minna”, the word …
>Should be 皆様, surely?
様 is only used in a few situations where that level of politeness is needed.. like on letters from your bank.
If you want a domain that promotes inclusiveness and togetherness why would you use a suffix that suggests a relationship like that?
To be honest I think it's stupid anyway. It's playing to the stereotypical image of all Japanese people being pacifist Bonsai fanciers that are all polite and nice to each other... To the outsider observer that has only ever seen the lovey dovey types that inhabit NHK it might well seem like that but the reality is fairly different.
I think Japanese doesn't use sexual words like "fuck" in the metaphorical way that English does --- only in their literal sense -- so fuck.everybody wouldn't work quite as well when translated into Japanese as it does in English.
(English doesn't have the gramatical politeness forms that Japanese does, so English speakers have to resort to using various forms of "fuck" to indicate that the sentence is not polite, e.g. "shut the fucking door" etc.)
。ます could be an amusing TLD...
"Given the homogeneity of Japanese society and the herd mentality, it could prove a popular suffix, although like all new gTLDs, there’s absolutely no guarantee that the domain won’t be a gigantic waste of time and money."
Given that the Japanese are quite diverse culturally, and the herd mentality is no more prevalent here than in the minds of people who subscribe to out dated concepts of racial superiority/inferiority, I'll opt for the latter of the two options.
Web trends do not stem from domain names.
*We* know that the Japanese are quite diverse culturally and ethnically, but a lot of われわれ日本人types don't seem to realise... including my very intelligent Japanese co-worker who insists that all Japanese people, whether they be from Okinawa or Hokkaido, have a unique body temperature shared by no other 'race'.
Don't we want a world where everyone can communicate, no matter where you came from, your skin color, etc? I do.
IDN shouldn't have been done. Creates at least 3 new kinds of vulnerabilities that will make phishing and bank robbing more successful, and probably more. The great success of the internet without it has proven non-English speakers get by just fine without IDN.
Separately, gTLD's are annoying/slightly risky from an infrastructure point of view, and it too will create more vulnerabilities. But here we are. So yay for Google owning all Japanese people.
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