Slashdot Mirror
The Curious Histories of Generic Domain Names
cheezitmike writes "ITworld.com uses the Wayback Machine to document the histories of five generic domain names: music.com, eat.com, car.com, meat.com, and milk.com. 'In this brave new Web 2.0 world, it's almost a badge of honor to have a Web site name that only hints at what the user will find there (see Flickr) or is so opaque as to offer no clue at all as to what the Web site is about (see del.icio.us). It's easy to forget the first Internet gold rush of the mid-to-late '90s, when dot-com domain names based on ordinary (and, investors hoped, marketable) nouns and verbs were snapped up by hopeful companies from the humble geeks who had purchased them (often ironically) in the early '90s.'"
I had a couple offers to buy my domain by 2 different owners and eras of skinny.com. I decided that an easy to remember URL and email address was worth more than they offered. The big bid was $5k, but half in cash, half in services I didn't need.
I wasn't holding out for the $big, but would take it of course. It was a personal investment, not a financial one.
By friend owned beef.com for years, kept trying to sell it to ranchers, PETA rented it for some time, I kept telling him to run a gay porn site on it.
He still has tobacco.com which has had several UDRP attempted hijackings on it.
I have sometimes wondered what Opera aficionados make of opera.com
I am sure someone at Slashdot will know how Opera got its name. I kind of guessed that some geek way back bought the domain name thinking it would be worth millions, then in the end used it for a company cause it was cool to have a generic domain.
Some domain names have been useful though. In Australia people sell ".au.com" domains, which are obviously sub-domains, quite different to Australia's official ".com.au" domains.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
Go to milk.com. It is some guys personal website from way back. He never sold it he never tried to sell it.
Forgot another one: jesus.com
I'm sure many of us remember the "Win a date with Jesus" site that lived at jesus.com for many, many years. You could even take a bath with Jesus. I've often wondered how it was that always-datable Jesus came to sell the domain.
I was at a small, but unaccountably well-connected college, sending email to my dad, who was working at a big tech company. Usually I just copied whatever route he'd chosen, and then marvelled as my mail got to him in LESS THAN TWO HOURS -- the very idea! At the time, it was still pretty unusual that two people would both have access to email, so I actually showed off to my friends -- "hey look at THIS!"
Well, one of my friends knew more than me, so he taught me about uuhosts -- a way to find out what was connected, for the times when my email was just vanishing because something, somewhere, was offline. So I used it. The next day I got some Very Crabby Email from a sysop who tore me a new one for using a satellite uplink to send personal email to Japan and back.
It felt like having a switchboard operator yell at me. I was *mortified* and I didn't even know for sure what I'd done.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I did something similar. I worked for a company that was doing software for the Boeing 777 and we polled them like every 10 minutes. We also polled sun and hp, 2 fairly well connect west coast servers. One day I came into work and our uucp links were melting down with email traffic (probably 50 emails an hour or something lame like that). The new UUCP maps had come out and we were the shortest hop to Boeing from just about anywhere. I ended up changing the maps to make us look more distant and implementing some email filtering. Good times...
I've often thought it would be cool if meat.com redirected to Terry Bisson's story, They're Made of Meat
Come play free flash games on Kongregate!
I was the original owner of "Codeplex.com" (Not so obvious of a name) before I sold it to Microsoft for a eye whopping $600. The site is now Microsoft's official opensource repository.
Microsoft created an umbrella company who specifically designed a horrendous website with no links back to them. Even after the research (which I found nothing), I thought I would be a nice guy and sell it to this nobody.
I know they did that so they didn't have to payout larger sums of money, but I still feel as if I was screwed first hand by Microsoft.
We always used to use sex.com at my first job to make sure the content filter was working properly... ahh... the days of Microsoft Proxy Server 2.0. At first we did it just because it was the most obvious thing we could think of. Later someone suggested using other adult orieted websites, to which, we decided that if it did go through, we didn't want to have to explain why backdoorsluts.com was on the report that went to management (to the female city manager).
:)
Its one thing to test a proxy, another to explain to management your choice in samples.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
I suspect that in the next 10-20 years there will be a big rush on people's full names. Currently only web developers and bloggers have their own name as a domain but as the web becomes more and more popular and a part of people's life, they will eventually buy their own name and point it somewhere.
That's why I own http://www.nealgrosskopf.com/ and grosskopf.name. Having your last name as a domain is nice because it allows you to create sub-domains of family members and create email addresses such as neal@grosskopf.name.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
Back in 1997 or so I remember going to a computer lab and a TA warned us not to type an extra "h" in yahoo.com (yahoo.com). That site actually made the news because it offered up porn for people who mis-typed.
The guy was threatened and sued I believe. He even made the news... Anyways I think the owner succumbed and let the domain lapse.
That's when I found it and registered it for fun. I remember setting up a catch-all email address, and would get thousands of emails (back during when spam wasn't that bad yet). It was interesting reading love letters, business proposals, nude pics, etc...
But then it got old, so I let it lapse too.
eTrade SUCKS