I’ve owned the domain name - theapplenation.com - for about 15 years and here is its weird story.

In 2009 Facebook introduced business pages. Before this time businesses and non-human entities started profiles that people would add as “friends”. When I saw the feature launch I tapped “create a page” and typed option+shift+k on my Mac because I didn’t have any other good ideas and I like the keyboard shortcut.

Overnight hundreds of thousands of people became fans of . 110,000 by January 2010, 160,000 by April. It was just a cool thing to see in the Facebook news feed: “Josh likes .”

A few weeks into it Apple legal got in touch and said no way was this cool, so we renamed it to “Fans of Apple”. Then a dude from CBS in LA gets in touch about monetising it and going big on the interwebs. He -and I - thought this Apple company might go somewhere in the world and maybe it would be a good business opportunity to create a project for fans of the company.

He was big on buzzwords like UGC and ROI. He suggested I register a domain name for the new project and community and he was busy getting funding from rich people. I was on breakfast radio in Esperance, Western Australia, so I waited patiently and decided upon theapplenation.com for the new brand.

They stopped replying to emails and I’ve held onto the domain since then. I’m tried a few times to start a blog or something on there but the truth is that I’m just a fan of Apple, I’m no Daring Fireball/Six Colours/MacWorld/MacStories/whatever.

An earlier version of this blog post had a failed project launch on it that wasn’t really that interesting. I deleted that part and left the good story part here instead.