There’s a lot of .buzz about Google’s new holding company, Alphabet. From .NYC to .London to .Tokyo the “new Google” story is making .news everywhere, as the .media large and small speculates on what it means for the .online and .tech industries, and beyond. After all, as one of the .top brands and companies in the .world, when Google makes a move it can have .global impact. One .company in particular is having a .party thanks to their sudden .link to Google’s surprising announcement, the domain name registry .xyz. That’s because in making their Alphabet announcement Google became the latest member in the .club of brands and companies betting on a new domain name extension rather than a more traditional .com web address. By choosing and using abc.xyz as the web address for the .website with the Alphabet announcement, .Google showed the world that it can be .cool to use a domain name that has some meaning on both sides of the “dot.” As a representation of the “alphabet,” abc.xyz makes perfect sense. It’s short, easy to remember and relevant. That is the goal for any good domain name, and that is the opportunity now presented by the wide choice of .domains now available.

Does it Twerk?

At the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Conference in October 2013 I was on a panel as part of “The Great Debate” between Frank Schilling and Rick Schwartz. During the panel I said that the domain industry hadn’t had its “twerking moment” yet, but that it would come. What I meant was, until Miley Cyrus made her now infamous performance on the Video Music Awards broadcast, very few people knew what “twerking” was. The day after the VMA’s everyone was talking about twerking (and more people than should have been were, um, demonstrating their own butt shaking moves). That moment, however, made twerking mainstream.

Is Google’s spelling move with abc.xyz our twerking moment? It is too soon to tell for sure, but it certainly has gotten the conversation going around new domains amongst a larger, more mainstream audience than were talking about them before, and that’s a good thing for everyone with an interest in the new domain extensions.

Over the past months, across the industry we’ve seen more and more businesses, brands and celebrities adopting new domains from TheHungerGames.movie, to BigMac.Rocks to BornThisWay.Foundation, to Lovato.club and on and on (more examples at InTheWild.domains). It is great to see Google at the dance in such a high profile way, and I expect this will be one of many more “twerking moments” to come.