Map.so is a short, clean and supercrisp brand set in the steadily stomping .SO domain extension. It’s a domain that makes an immediate impression in one way or another, so it’s up to you whether your offering could benefit from this head-on effect.

As for the offering itself, it’s such a common, short and culturally imbued keyword that there are really so many directions you can take your brand story. Indeed, this flexibility is taken next level, with Map.so being the epitome of an ’empty vessel’ domain, leaving you almost endless room in which to brand the way YOU want.

The Trending .SO Extension

This is how so many of the early .SO adopters are using this domain extension. Taking a tidy dictionary word in whichever brand direction they choose. This is the ’empty-vessel’ branding we speak of here, a time-proven strategy that continues to return gains for those who can creatively fill in the space this approach enables.

Leading lights are already using the .SO extension as part of their strategy, injecting a sense of innovation into their brand and savvily taking marketshare (in their niches, but also in highly competitive branding spaces centring around the most supemely brandable keywords out there).

Deploying on .SO means gaining an entry point to such competive branding spaces, a viable ‘in’ through which you can disruptively carve out your piece of the branding pie, while not compromising on the strength of the target keyword or adding unncessary noise to your brand.

You can see this strategy successfully play out in the case of leaders such as Circle.so and Notion.so (and its companion productivity booster, Super.so).

Like the now widely adopted .IO extension, adoption in the productivity space has been pretty central to the evolution of the .SO extension so far, and the movers have also tended to follow this robust single word choice trend, with ’empty vessel’ domains like Beyond.so, Opal.so, and Rock.so hitting their audience well.

.IO saw similar adoption by productivity players during the first stages of its development into the major extension it is today.

Sustaining the .SO Breakout

Seeing such ‘serious’ projects already onboard .SO bodes well. As it means the office crowd are already here. This is important, as it can be tricky for a breakout extension to gain clout at first, as there’s a familiarization period — and if humans are good at anything, it’s not changing until they fear being left behind.

During this early stage of adoption, much of the value of the extension tends to be linked to the quality & clout of the projects that’ve already bought in. As is said, few want to go first, but nobody wants to be last. Thus the less self-assured and/or more constrained watch from the sidelines during the earlier stages of the emerging play.

A phase which .SO seems to have left behind in 2024, as more brands deploy on the extension — or take their .SO brand equivalent off the market, to deny other players this savvy entry point to the respective branding space.

.SO in the Cryptospace

A host of actors in the wider cryptospace are already on .SO. Some of the sweetest sounding projects from a phonological perspective (earspective) have to be Parcel.so and Stake.so (now assumed into the Coinbase family).

As with high-level use of the .SO extension in other sectors, the same strong ‘pure keyword’ strategy is central among top projects in the cryptospace, with Pay.so and Orca.so among the most easily indentifiable and engaging brands out there.

Alongside the steady flow of adoption has come the steadily soaring adaptation of the costing aspect of .SO. In terms of publically reported sales, Meta.so stands top of the pile so far, selling for US$ 149k.

Extras:Logo set. .SO profile package.

Touchwords:Adventurous. Accurate. Agile.

Ready to plot a course to success?