SocialDomainers.com, a new social network for Social Domainers has just been launched by Tony Kanakaris, a Long Island, New York based domainer. The network was set up in order to help local domainers meet and connect. For today’s launch, the site is giving away an Apple iPad for the 1,000th member to sign up for the site, which has been running in a private beta for a while.

[Update] Tony just told DNN that two more lucky members who sign up before April 1st, 2010 will also have the chance to win an iPad.

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Following the course of other TLDs, such as .DE, Nominet has posted a document for their members and registrars proposing the release of single and double character domain names in the third level of the .UK domain (under co.uk, .org.uk, .me.uk and .net.uk). The release would exclude some domains that have been registered before the establishing of Nominet as the registry operator in 1996. According to the consultation, Nominet is considering releasing the domains in two phases: A first round for trademark holders, followed by a Dutch Auction (starting with a high price being reduced until a buyer is found, similar to the release of second level .MX domains).

The corresponding consultation runs for three months, from 8 March 2010 until 8 June 2010.  To provide your feedback, you can either complete the online survey or email your answers to shortdomains@nominet.org.uk.

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Machine to machine (M2M) communications via 3G cellular data links is expanding in the enterprise. Sixnet offers a battery of new products to make it simple and cost-effective to network kiosks, remote offices, point-of-sale equipment and digital signage.

Cisco Tuesday announced a major upgrade to its Internet core router, which is designed to serve as the foundation of the next-generation Internet and support growth of video transmission, mobile devices and new online services through this decade and beyond.

Synology today released a new version of its NAS operating system.

QNAP today announced a pair Atom D510 based four-bay rackmount NASes.

Bill Detwiler examines three types of anti-malware tools and explains how they can find and remove malware. Once you?ve watched this TR Dojo video, you can find a link to the original TechRepublic article and print the tip from our TR Dojo Blog.

When I visit my company's overseas offices, I'm often asked what we can do to control USB ports and other external connectors in order to prevent the loss of intellectual property. That's a goal I'm always interested in pursuing.

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Download this file for the latest in virus detection and repair. The i32 Intelligent Updater package cannot be used to update Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition servers but can be used to update Corporate Edition clients. This definitions update is a complete replacement for any previous virus definitions set.

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The cool new handheld Wi-Fi troubleshooter from Fluke Networks can help network technicians who aren't RF engineers to quickly diagnose a range of common wireless LAN problems.

With 4G networks due to hit the mass market over the next two years, some application developers are looking at ways to exploit the new high-speed connections to improve their apps' performance and capabilities.

Wouldn't it be great if Google installed its gigabit broadband network in cities that could really use the help?

IDC released its worldwide disk storage market report for 2009, which showed the first quarter-over-quarter increase in revenue for disk systems since the third quarter of 2008, with more than 3.3 petabytes of capacity shipping in the fourth quarter alone.

A major earthquake and several aftershocks in Taiwan, which injured dozens of people and caused several fires on Thursday, also sent Chunghwa Telecom workers scrambling to fix undersea fiber-optic telecommunications cables to prevent service disruptions around Asia.

National Public Radio now count themselves as having the tiniest shortened URL for use on Twitter and other social media sites. The organization announced their new domain N.PR yesterday on their blog. The company had been using Stumble Upon’s  Su.pr url shortener on most of their Twitter accounts. NPR will continue using npr.org as their main site address and begin shortening all their URLs in-house with the n.pr domain.

From the blog

I know what you are thinking… Isn’t npr.org short enough? Normally, yes, but Twitter only allows messages to contain 140 characters. Shorter URLs are better since they give users more room to add their own thoughts in a tweet. So when we had the opportunity to acquire n.pr – .pr is the top-level domain for Puerto Rico – we couldn’t pass it up.

With tweets limited to 140 characters, using the shortest possible URL to link in to your site seems to be gaining popularity.  For example, Facebook recently created FB.me , Google has Goo.gl and there are even services like Yourls that help you set up your own URL shortening service.

Having a single letter domain in a top level ccTLD like this does make NPR stand out. I imagine more large content sites, news organizations and publications will be look at this option in the future.

Update : While others in the comments below have mentioned other 4 character URLs that match NP.R as having the shortest URL,  my co-editor pointed out a story we covered in December about .TO which is claiming to be the shortest URL-shortener available.  The only problem with their service is browser requirements which make the url in to http://to./yff ,  adding http:// and putting the period after the extension and don’t work with some browsers.  Comments in the previous post also point out that www.to and .to are separate entities, which means a mistype could end you up at a different site altogether.  Talk about confusing !  I’d stick with the short URLs that seem to work across all browsers

(c) 2009 DomainNameNews.com

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