Linked List: June 16, 2023

Friday, 16 June 2023

Google Domains Shutting Down, Assets Sold to Squarespace ★

Abner Li, reporting for 9to5Google:

In an unexpected announcement today, Google Domains is “winding down following a transition period,” with Squarespace taking over the business and assets.

Squarespace announced today that it “entered into a definitive asset purchase agreement with Google, whereby Squarespace will acquire the assets associated with the Google Domains business.” This includes “approximately 10 million domains hosted on Google Domains spread across millions of customers.”

Google cited “efforts to sharpen our focus” in selling the Google Domains registrar business, which launched in 2014 as a big proponent of HTTPS and top-level domains (TLDs) as of late. The service exited beta in 2022.

Funny enough, I just used Google Domains for the first time two weeks ago to register a .foo domain name to use with Bluesky. (Very easy to do, and one of Bluesky’s best and most innovative features.) I went to check on it when I saw this news that Google Domains is shutting down, and I had an alert that the new domain name I registered would be put on “hold” today if I didn’t verify the email address I used to register it. I hadn’t seen any verification emails from Google about it. I told Google Domains to send another verification email. Still didn’t see it. Turns out that even though I used an @gmail.com address to register the domain, every single email from Google Domains was being flagged as spam. So Google’s own email service considers all emails from Google’s own domain name service to be spam.

So, yeah, I’d say Google needs to focus.

Jay Peters Interviews Reddit CEO Steve Huffman for The Verge ★

Huffman: We offer the API so the vast majority of our use of the uses of the API — so not these, the other 98 percent of them that make tools, bots, enhancements for Reddit — that’s what the API is for.

It was never designed to support third-party apps. We let it exist. And I should take the blame for that, because I was the guy arguing for that for a long time. But I didn’t know — and this is my fault — the extent that they were profiting off of our API. That these were not charities.

The ones that actually are doing good for our users — RedReader, Dystopia, Luna — like actually adding real value at their own cost? We’ve exempted. We’ll carry that cost.

Peters: I want to stop you for a second there. So you’re saying that Apollo, RIF, Sync, they don’t add value to Reddit?

Huffman: Not as much as they take. No way.

Either you see the value of a great user experience or you don’t. No surprise that the CEO of a company whose website is so bad that they’ve had to keep the old one around as an alternative doesn’t see the value Apollo adds to the Reddit experience.