Recently, Dave Winer posted an entry on scripting.com about a need that he sees in the domain market that he thinks presents a good opportunity for a new startup.

The idea is this: make it easy for customers to assign a domain name to a particular resource. Specifically a customer should be able to buy a domain and then give out subdomains to others or allow them to purchase a subdomain. There should be an API of course, and the whole thing should be really easy to use.

As soon as the article was posted I started receiving tweets from people asking if this might be something interesting for DNSimple to consider. From a technical standpoint it makes sense that DNSimple could do this, likely as a separate service. I started thinking about how it could be implemented and came up with the idea of using NAPTR records as the mechanism for software to query to determine what URL a domain name points to. The second thing would be to include a URL forwarding entry so that if you hit the domain with a browser then you’d be redirected to the resource.

Let’s look at an example:

• Assume I have the domain anthony.com delegated to the name servers for this service.
• If I create an entry for twitter.anthony.com and point it to http://twitter.com/aeden then
• If I `dig twitter.anthonyeden.com naptr` then I would see
• twitter.anthony.com. 3600 IN NAPTR 0 1 "u" "n2u:uri" "!^.*$!http://twitter.com/aeden!" .
• If I browse to twitter.anthony.com then I would be URL forwarded to http://twitter.com/aeden with a 301 Redirect.

The concept is pretty straightforward. I’ve already created a simple prototype, but before I go any further I wanted to find out if there are other people interested in a service like this. Would you be willing to share revenue on sales of subdomains? Would you be willing and interested in integrating NAPTR DNS lookups in your software as a way to resolve a domain name to a URL?

Edit: There seems to be some question as to whether or not NAPTR records are really needed. Here’s why I think they are: A 301 redirect will work, however this means that a redirector server has to be hosted by the service that is providing the delegation, in addition to name servers. NAPTR, with adoption by clients (like browsers) means that the DNS record alone could provide all the details that client needs to make its next move. I think that this is a much more scalable long-term solution and thus I would propose that both a URL forwarding system and NAPTR records are useful for a redirect service.