Geolocation and Domains Extensions – Is your airport code going to be the next big thing?

There is big buzz on the internet these days about Geolocation.  Wikipedia says:
“Geolocation is the identification of the real-world geographic location of an object, such as a cell phone or an Internet-connected computer terminal. Geolocation may refer to the practice of assessing the location, or to the actual assessed location.”

From an internet marketing and mobile marketing aspect, geolocation is about identifying where you are and then filtering data so you get information that relevant to you.

Mobile apps such as FourSquare and Yelp utilize the GPS information from your cell phone to make recommendations about businesses around you.

Services such as Groupon (the group coupon phenom) have you choose the city that you want to receive deals from.

In the old days (last year or the year before), the country code domain extensions were one way to experience geolocation. When you go to bell.ca or sainsburys.co.uk you know which country that company is providing services for. .ca also had the ability to break the name down into provinces – sk.ca, bc.ca, on.ca and so on.

Now here’s what I was thinking – let’s take geolocation in domain names a step further. Let’s say I have a small business in Portland or Vancouver. I have my .com or my .ca but I want to dominate my market. It would be nice to refine my location even further by using city names. But typing joesflowers.vancouver or decksrus.portland would drive most users bonkers.

I suggest that we take all those delightful airport codes that we know and love, and turn them into high performing domain extensions. Vancouver is YVR and Portland is PDX and that would give us Joesflowers.yvr and decksrus.pdx. Neat!

If you want to be the king of coffee for St. Anthony’s Newfoundland then coffeeking.yay is the answer. Farnborough UK is your estate agencies patch? Priemierestates.fab is just the ticket.

So SFOites, YYZ peeps and JFKsters, stand up and say “I ♥ my airport code” and maybe ICANN will listen.

(Image: We borrowed this terrific image of airport code patches from the super cool SternLab. Read the related blog post here.)