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.'"

still waiting

[gEvil (beta)]

I'm still waiting for someone to make me an offer on my domain: thissitewillmakemerich.com

Re:

[fullmetal55]

because nobody wants to make you rich they want to make themselves rich, so it should be "www.thissitewillmakeyourich.com"

Re:still waiting

[fo0bar]

I own iwantyoutogivemeyourmoney.com [iwantyouto...rmoney.com]. Unfortunately, it hasn't been as profitable as I expected.

Re:still waiting

[gEvil (beta)]

SOLD!



(hehehe. sucker.)

Marketing Genius

[deadeye766]

I'm no marketing genius, but who the hell thought domain names like meat.com and milk.com were going to be goldmines?!?

Re:Marketing Genius

[Ajehals]

The same people who thought that people would be exclusively buying their milk and meat (and admittedly other foodstuffs) on-line by now, some of them were VC's and dumped a huge amount of cash on this IIRC..

Re:Marketing Genius

[Firehed]

How could a VC firm not be intelligent enough to realize that mail-order perishables isn't going to work out well, especially on cheap heavy things that would be a logistical nightmare to ship?

I mean, sure, it looks like that whole world wide internet web thing is starting to catch on, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that you can't make much of a business of shipping a $4 gallon of milk. I suppose an online milkman type thing would stand a chance but people are so used to running out for milk every day anyways that it just wouldn't make sense. Margins on most foods are just too low for anything of that nature to make sense. I suppose filet mignon could work (and, indeed, I'm pretty sure you can buy it from Amazon these days) since it's got a much more workable price/weight ratio, but this is like pets.com thinking that shipping fifty-pound bags of kitty litter would work out.

Re:

[dzfoo]

>> I mean, sure, it looks like that whole world wide internet web thing is starting to catch on, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that you can't make much of a business of shipping a $4 gallon of milk.

No, it did not take a genius; it took quite a few thousand idiots, and a sh*tload of money to realize it.

        -dZ.

Re:

[omeomi]

No, it did not take a genius; it took quite a few thousand idiots, and a sh*tload of money to realize it.

Well, those two things are pretty interchangeable. And idiots are a lot easier to find. 1 Genius = 3000 idiots + money

Re:

[Homr Zodyssey]

I don't think you guys are using your imagination. "milk.com" does not necessarily need to sell milk to be a marketing goldmine. It just has to do something relating to milk. Maybe it could be a place to research where your milk came from.
You could learn about different kinds of milk like

• whole milk

• soy milk

• 2% milk

• 1% milk

• skim milk

• goat milk

• chocolate milk

• milk-shakes

• milk chocolate

• condensed milk

• evaporated milk

• powdered milk

• butter-milk

• malted milk

• milk of magnesia

• br3@st milk

• sour milk

• milk and ho

Re:

[lymond01]

You own milk.com, don't you?

Who's to say it couldn't just be purchased by the same place that runs the "Got Milk?" and "Milk: it does the body good" commercials? Advertising for a healthy product plus tie-ins for centralized shipping (not mail-order but for farmers and trucking companies), information (as noted above), etc.

Re:Marketing Genius

[OECD]

I don't think you guys are using your imagination. "milk.com" does not necessarily need to sell milk to be a marketing goldmine.

You're almost there...

• br3@st milk

Bingo! With that and "meat.com" and you can almost print money...

Re:

[hitmark]

mail order may not work, but what about being able to order the whole shopping cart without going out the door, and having it delivered? remember, this was also the time when everone would be working from home if their job allowed it...

Re:

[El Yanqui]

Well as a former employee of Kozmo.com when they first opened in Seattle, I can say with a bit of authority that VCs in the late 90s didn't realize a hell of a lot. "Deliver movies ordered online in an hour? With no delivery charge? Something, something. Profit!"

Re:Marketing Genius

[DerekLyons]

How could a VC firm not be intelligent enough to realize that mail-order perishables isn't going to work out well, especially on cheap heavy things that would be a logistical nightmare to ship?

Given the extensive history of companies selling perishables mail order, I'd suspect the lack of intelligence is on the part of the Slashdot poster rather than the VC firms. Omaha Steaks [omahasteaks.com] has been doing it since at least the 70's (I say at least because I think I have an even earlier advertisement from them somewhere in my files, but cannot locate it ATM). Swiss Colony [swisscolony.com] even longer. In fact, such shipping has been going on since dry ice was first produced in industrial quantites in the 1920's.
 
Look in the advertisements of most National Geographics of the 50's, or and food magazine from the same era, and you'll see ads aplenty.
 
</culinary_geek>
 
The mistake the VC firms of the dot bomb era made was, as you point out, marketing the wrong things to the wrong demographic. However, given the history of food deliveries and the increased performance of shipping companies as the 90's advanced - and it wasn't clearly obvious that their schemes were off the mark. (Doubly so since the big grocery chains have been slowly expanding into online ordering...)
 
Foresight isn't always 20-20 on Slashdot either, back in the day there were a lot of posts explaining how Amazon and Netflix were going to fail 'any day now'. They simply couldn't compete with bricks-and-mortar everyone said. The future lay with clicks-and-mortar, with Barnes and Noble, and Blockbuster...

Re:Marketing Genius

[phoebusQ]

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_.

Re:

[Dancindan84]

Call me paranoid, but there's no way on earth any sane person would just plug in meat.com expecting (hoping?) to find steaks on an internet full of porn (which it was even back then). I'm just going to type in gloryhole.com and see if it's a site on glass blowing... AH GOD MY EYES!!

Re:Marketing Genius

[jawtheshark]

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.

Re:Marketing Genius

[JimDaGeek]

Oh, come on now. Non-tech people didn't have the same "dirty" thoughts as us geeks.

I have 85 year old grandparents that have been married for over 50 years! Yeah, longer than most of us geeks were just a dirty thought in their daddy's head (no pun intended).

Older people just don't put 2 and 2 together and come up with 4 when it comes to the inter-tubes. They are after all, a series of pipes.

Now, as far as old school goes, I remember watching a pic download over a dog-old modem of a nude chick. Damn, talk about fun. I remember seeing the boobs start to show and then slowly the belly and then... damn, ouch mom, what was that slap for?

Re:

[kestasjk]

I can just imagine those naive days of the internet, where they imagined care free 8 year olds typing "meat.com" into the browser to look up information on meat, without any concerns about whether or not "meat.com" would contain genuine information on meat products.

Re:

[dosboot]

Now we replace 'meat' with 'wikipedia'. Zing!

Re:

[Firehed]

Replace "meat" with "whitehouse" and you did an excellent job summing up some awkward situations in middle school.

Luckily back then, websites had about a 22% uptime so you had a pretty good chance of 404ing when a teacher was nearby.

Obligatory Anchorman Reference

[kellyb9]

"Milk was a BAD choice"

Re:

[RobBebop]

largely thanks to Google

You are wrong. Web searching was available from Altavista.com, Yahoo.com, and Excite.com LONG before Google.com made a meaningful impact on the World Wide Web. Hell, even AOL's proprietary crapware gave you the ability to search the web.

Re:

[phoebusQ]

I didn't saw searching the web, but rather the significant boost in the efficacy of those searches. Google brought the issues of search relevance out into the public eye more than any company before it, as evidenced by the massive adoption of the engine by the general public.

Re:

[RobBebop]

Don't get me wrong... I completely AGREE with everything else you say. During the AOL days, I would type pornographic words into the Address Bar hoping to find the content that should have been there. I would use "ESPN" and a relatively small subset of URLs which I had memorized. But that list of URLs included mainly search engines, because search makes it unimportant to have common URL names.

Maybe we just started using the internet in different ways at different times, but up until 2001 or 2002, sea

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

You give Google WAY too much credit. They were a late, late entrant to the search field, and were far more important in ad revenue than they ever were in search. Think Archie > Jughead > Lycos > AltaVista, Excite...... > google

Re:

[phoebusQ]

Google significantly boosted the efficacy of the typical user search over what had been previously achieved by AltaVista, Yahoo, Lycos, etc...that is how they gained their initial market share, and what ultimately lead to the reduction in desireability of the "generic" domain.

Re:

[Nick Driver]

who the hell thought domain names like meat.com and milk.com were going to be goldmines?

Obviously the kind of people whose brains think at the complete opposite end of the spectrum as the folks who thought up this one. [icanhascheezburger.com]

Re:

[onepoint]

What a great site. I was lost, now iz found warm home

Re:Marketing Genius

[KillerCow]

I'm no marketing genius, but who the hell thought domain names like meat.com and milk.com were going to be goldmines?!?

Someone who thought that they could sell meat.com to:
The American Butchers' Association
The German Butchers' Association
Elite Butchers Association
The National Meat Packers Association
Alberta meat packers
Butcher Consultants Ltd
M&M Meat Shops
PETA
A Gay Porn Site

Someone who thought that they could sell milk.com to:
The USDA
Dairy Farmers of Ontario (owner of milk.org)
British Columbia Milk Marketing Board (milk-bc.com)
Any other milk marketing board (big, subsidized, cash-rich, protected business)
A Gay Porn Site

I'm no marketing genius either, but I think that it would be safe to think that those names would be worth at least $1000 to any of those organizations. Turning $10 into $1000 is a pretty good scam if you can do it a couple of times.

Re:

[jumpingfred]

Go to milk.com. It is some guys personal website from way back. He never sold it he never tried to sell it.

Re:Marketing Genius

[techno-vampire]

Why? You're no different from most slashdotters.

Re:

[Mex]

I'm no marketing genius, but who the hell thought domain names like meat.com and milk.com were going to be goldmines?!?

Not just that, they have apparently grabbed all those ".com keywords" for other foreign languages. It's pretty clear, because you visit the spanish equivalent, and it's full of english ads.

Forgot one

[billius]

porn.com

Re:

[gbaldwin2]

sex.com was the fun one. With all the who-stole-what intrigue.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:

[dryueh]

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.

Re:Forgot one

[antifoidulus]

The hosting costs crucified him

Re:

[The One and Only]

Jesus has moved to DateJesus.com [datejesus.com].

The operative word is "almost"

[winkydink]

...it's almost a badge of honor to have a Web site name that only hints at what the user will find there...

The only reason companies resort to those names is because (a) all the good ones are taken and/or (b) there are potential trademark infringement issues with using more common sounding names.

Re:

[pegr]

...it's almost a badge of honor to have a Web site name that only hints at what the user will find there...
 
Like slashdot?

Remember domain names BEFORE the web

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:

[morgan_greywolf]

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.

You kids and yer newfangled 'domain names'! Sheesh! Why, in my day, we had !-paths. To e-mail someone far away was truly an exercise in typing:

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.

You could tell the route your mail was gonna take! And we LIKED it that way!

Now you kids get off my lawn!

Domain names, indeed. *shakes head in disgust*

Re:

[sconeu]

You kids and yer newfangled 'domain names'! Sheesh! Why, in my day, we had !-paths. To e-mail someone far away was truly an exercise in typing:

And everything went through either decwrl or ucbvax.

Re:

[idontgno]

In Soviet Russia, kremvax [wikipedia.org] bang paths you!

Re:

[ahsile]

Bang paths... the horror... the repressed memories! I never want to see those again. Please.

Re:Remember domain names BEFORE the web

[smellsofbikes]

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.

Re:Remember domain names BEFORE the web

[gbaldwin2]

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...

Re:

[caluml]

That could explain a lot [bbc.co.uk]. Messing with email instead of writing solid thrust controllers. :)

Re:

[SurturZ]

then marvelled as my mail got to him in LESS THAN TWO HOURS

Hehe Fidonet in the late 80's - living in Australia, I got excited when I got a reply from the US within three days :-)

Re:

[DdJ]

You could tell the route your mail was gonna take! And we LIKED it that way!

No, you couldn't. It depended on the order in which various hosts used various parsing rules, and there wasn't always a standard for that. I mean, how did mail to "kremvax!drycas!doug%fnord![e-mail]" route? If you only used UUCP, then it was easy, but the moment you became more interconnected...

Oh god, the flashbacks have started. Quick, someone hold me down and hit me in the face with the second edition of the ba

uphill both ways

[Hognoxious]

[Yorkshire accent] Luxury! We had to manually scratch the message using an old matchstick onto paper tape - I say paper, it were skin - our own, if dad were in a bad mood - and attach it to t'pigeon. And if it had to go more than thirty miles, you had to attach another message asking t'recipient to attach it to one of his pigeons and forward it on. If it had to do more than three hops, you had to send another pigeon with even more forwarding instructions, or their little legs'd fall off, bless 'em, the p

Over all these years

[Hsien-Ko]

purple.com always delivered what it promises.

Re:

[UID30]

And of course the other end of the spectrum is ... http://zombo.com/ [zombo.com]. ... the real is unreal at zombo com.

Re:

[Chris Mattern]

You can do anything you want at zombo com.

Re:

[Firehed]

Having been super-goatse'd from following a slashdotter's advice before, do I dare probe this domain for a sarcasm tag from work?

Re:

[geminidomino]

It's safe. Just a big blank purple page...

Well, not blank. There's a FAQ link...

Re:

[Firehed]

Huh, truth in advertising... a rare occurrence these days. And certainly better than goatse.

Oh goatse... that will haunt me forever.

Ugh, damn. I'm thinking about it again.

Re:

[griffjon]

unlike http://zombo.com/ [zombo.com] ; which just taunts you.

Dreadful names

[hcdejong]

I, for one, hate seeing common, general words be misused like that. It's a lower-than-low attention grab.

Re:

[sukotto]

I've often thought it would be cool if meat.com redirected to Terry Bisson's story, They're Made of Meat [terrybisson.com]

Am I in that group?

[skinny.net]

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.

A great name does not a great site make

[Nemilar]

The biggest advantage to a generic domain name is that you'll get lots of type-ins; for example, freemusic.com* I'm sure gets hundreds of hits a day, just from (unknowing) users typing it in, hoping for something good.

But in the new era, sites become popular because they are viral; flickr didn't become popular because of type-ins, it became popular because it offered a good service that people found useful, and it spread.

--A great name does not a great site make; but a great site can a great name make.-- Heck, just at Google! Verb, noun, and fun to say!

(*Disclaimer: I have no idea what's at freemusic.com, but I'm guessing it's parked by someone)

Re:

[MBGMorden]

Talking like Yoda does not a great post make.

Re:

[forty7]

He's not talking like Yoda, he's talking like Richard Lovelace [wikipedia.org]. To quote: "Stone walls do not a prison make / Nor iron bars a cage."

Someone please tell me that this is still a well-known quote, even if the source isn't. Please :o)

The Future

[carrier lost]

"Hello, internet? I'd like some meat, please."

"Just send it right over. Thanks, bye"

Re:

[ajlitt]

The reality of that future:

"O HAI; CAN I HAS MEAT PLS? KTHXBYE"

Tubes are involved in transport, and inexplicably Soviet Russia. The meat is most likely going to be Spam, and you'll get sued if you share it with anyone.

The Future is awesome!

Re:

[carrier lost]

And let us not forget the timeless:

"I for one, welcome our meat overlords from the internet"

ANUS.com

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.anus.com/ [anus.com]

Never a greater disappointment in a web site's contents in my WHOLE LIFE.

Re:

[Quattro Vezina]

Well, the people who run anus.com are Neo-Nazi assholes, so the name fits.

Opera

[NewsWatcher]

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.

Re:

[STrinity]

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

Re:Opera

[Mr. Underbridge]

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.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the browser that doesn't work is called "Internet Explorer".

Oh wait, I see what you mean now.

Re:

[jfruhlinger]

Actually, it's the other way around. Opus is singluar, opera is plural.

Re:

[setirw]

???.com.?? would also be a subdomain, as com.?? is more than just a suffix. Just pointing that out.

Re:

[Varitek]

Opera used to use opera.no as its primary domain, as they didn't own opera.com

Re:

[Fear the Clam]

Opera used to use opera.no as its primary domain, as they didn't own opera.com

That must have driven their marketing people batshit.

Re:

[Chris Mattern]

Opera? No!

Re:

[Mex]

"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."

What? No! The Opera Browser used to be hosted at www.operasoftware.com , that's where I used to get it from for years.

Being forgetful, I did visit www.opera.com expecting to find the browser, but it was just a parked domain name.

So sometime in the past couple of years, they must have realized opera.com was worth buying. And i

Re:

[McDutchie]

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.

I don't think so, as Opera started out at opera.nta.no [opera.nta.no] and got the opera.com domain only later. The Wayback Machine says [archive.org] the domain was owned by someone else in 1998.

Re:

[Kelson]

IIRC, it was chosen because the word was common to most European languages, so it would sound familiar to anyone in their initial target audience.

milk.com FAQ

[xanthines-R-yummy]

I love the FAQ milk.com! It's so appropriately craptastastic, I almost feel nostalgic...

stupid.com

[phobos13013]

Well, I must say I never thought of making a /. article out of this one, but since about 1999 which is when I started working on my own computers for hobby, I would use stupid.com [archive.org] as a network test to see if I was online or not and not just loading a cached page (since I only go there when I am testing my network once in a blue moon...) One thing I have noticed about this site, it still feels like I'm in 1999 when I load it... [stupid.com]

Re:

[presidentbeef]

ARG! MY EYEBALLS!!

imeem.com = Music Site

[illectro]

imeem is an odd site - it used to be a p2p im + social network + filesharing (hence the im part) but it changed and now it's one of the biggest music sites on the web, with a name which really doesn't have any hint at all about music. The funny thing is, now it's an established player there are a few music startups who're playing on their name (meemix.com is a good example)

apple.com

[Tuoqui]

Whoever got apple.com must have been sitting on a goldmine.

Re:

[MarkRose]

Except apple.com has been registered for over 20 years!

Domain Name: APPLE.COM
Registrar: MARKMONITOR INC.
Whois Server: whois.markmonitor.com
Referral URL: http://www.markmonitor.com/ [markmonitor.com]
Name Server: NSERVER.APPLE.COM
Name Server: NSERVER.ASIA.APPLE.COM
Name Server: NSERVER.EURO.APPLE.COM
Name Server: NSERVER2.APPLE.COM
Nam

From the article ..

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

What, were you going to have a Web site dedicated to your favorite MIDI files?

But.. but I did have a website dedicated to my favorite MIDI files.. and it was cool .. it *IS* cool. .. and *I* am cool.

Th.. The Mommm- Mo moldy pp Peaches told me so.

news.com.com

[riceboy50]

I always found it strange that CNet decided to make news.com the name so they registered com.com and made the site news.com.com. Nowadays news.com.com just redirects to news.com, so they must have figured out that it was weird before. I remember there was much lampooning with com ad infinitum.

Re:

[TeknoHog]

For a long time, Finnish domain names had to be of the form thecompletenameofthebusiness.fi. This of course led to some incredibly long and stupid names. For example, a magazine called Bisnes.FI got the domain bisnesfi.fi.

Badge of honor?

[spectecjr]

Badge of honor to have an opaque domain name?

Not so.

Try registering a domain name that isn't opaque. It's nearly impossible these days - people bought all the obvious ones, and most of the non-obvious ones. Most of them are just domain squatters hoping to get rich, or spamvertising sites.

Codeplex.com

[Brobock]

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.

Poop.com

[cheesyfru]

Ahhh.. the good old days, when Poop.com was a shop for fossilized dinosaur dung [archive.org]. Endangered feces, indeed.

Testing a Content Filter with Sex.com

[Ohio Calvinist]

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. :)

art.com

[CrazyTalk]

Reminds me of art.com, a web site I consulted for (different company from current owners of that domain). Before the site specializing in selling posters and prints was launched in the late 90s, the art.com domain belonged to Advanced Rotorcraft Technology, some helicopter tech organization. IIRC, the poster company paid something like half a million dollars for the domain.

Domain Gold Rush 2.0

[WebmasterNeal]

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/ [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 [e-mail].

Yahhoo.com

[Jesus IS the Devil]

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.

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[Culture20]

Back in 1994 no one was thinking about _selling_ stuff over the internet. Milk.com and Meat.com would have been used purely as informational placards. I can remember how many 1-page index.html websites I made back then for companies that just wanted a presence. The only one I remember that seemed to be doing something useful was a crematorium. (!)