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The Curious Histories of Generic Domain Names

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the awesome.com-idea.com dept.

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.'"

9 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. Remember domain names BEFORE the web by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Remember that domain names pre-date the world wide web. Someone may have been using barf.com as a simple FTP site and never had a web page associated with it.

    1. Re:Remember domain names BEFORE the web by smellsofbikes · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.
    2. Re:Remember domain names BEFORE the web by gbaldwin2 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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...

  2. Re:Marketing Genius by phoebusQ · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Before web searching was as effective as it is now (largely thanks to Google), it wasn't illogical to think that people might type generic domains to find what they are looking for, i.e. meat.com if they are looking to order meat, get info on meat, or what have you.

    The idea that many marketers (and others) had is that not only would owning such domains get you more traffic, but it would also begin to associate the very idea of _noun_ on the web with your particular brand of _noun_.

  3. Over all these years by Hsien-Ko · · Score: 5, Funny

    purple.com always delivered what it promises.

  4. Am I in that group? by skinny.net · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. Re:Opera by Mr.+Underbridge · · Score: 5, Funny

    Opera is the singular of opus, "work". Easy enough to figure out why the browser uses that name.

    Is that meant to be ironic? Web browsers are what people use to *not* work.

  6. Re:Marketing Genius by jawtheshark · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Ehm, you're confusing "slashdotters with experience" and "normal people". Normal people would most certainly write things like "dinner.com" or "restaurant.com", just to stay a bit more realist. The GP is right, Google changed the market. Domain names aren't as important as they used to be, search ranks are.

    --
    Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
  7. Codeplex.com by Brobock · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.