The Curious Histories of Generic Domain Names 208
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:still waiting (Score:5, Funny)
Re:still waiting (Score:4, Funny)
(hehehe. sucker.)
Marketing Genius (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Marketing Genius (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Marketing Genius (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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No, it did not take a genius; it took quite a few thousand idiots, and a sh*tload of money to realize it.
-dZ.
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Well, those two things are pretty interchangeable. And idiots are a lot easier to find. 1 Genius = 3000 idiots + money
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You could learn about different kinds of milk like
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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 (Score:4, Funny)
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...
Bingo! With that and "meat.com" and you can almost print money...
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Re:Marketing Genius (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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_.
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Re:Marketing Genius (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Marketing Genius (Score:4, Funny)
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?
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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 (Score:4, Funny)
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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.
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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
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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]
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Re:Marketing Genius (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Marketing Genius (Score:5, Funny)
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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 (Score:2, Insightful)
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He still has tobacco.com which has had several UDRP attempted hijackings on it.
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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 (Score:5, Funny)
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The operative word is "almost" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Like slashdot?
Remember domain names BEFORE the web (Score:5, Insightful)
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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*
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And everything went through either decwrl or ucbvax.
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In Soviet Russia, kremvax [wikipedia.org] bang paths you!
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Re:Remember domain names BEFORE the web (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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Hehe Fidonet in the late 80's - living in Australia, I got excited when I got a reply from the US within three days
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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!wubba%diddle@bletch.com" 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 (Score:2)
Over all these years (Score:5, Funny)
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Well, not blank. There's a FAQ link...
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Oh goatse... that will haunt me forever.
Ugh, damn. I'm thinking about it again.
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Dreadful names (Score:2)
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Am I in that group? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
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Someone please tell me that this is still a well-known quote, even if the source isn't. Please
The Future (Score:4, Funny)
"Just send it right over. Thanks, bye"
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"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!
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"I for one, welcome our meat overlords from the internet"
ANUS.com (Score:2, Funny)
Never a greater disappointment in a web site's contents in my WHOLE LIFE.
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Opera (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Opera (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.
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Oh wait, I see what you mean now.
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That must have driven their marketing people batshit.
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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
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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.
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milk.com FAQ (Score:3, Funny)
stupid.com (Score:3, Informative)
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imeem.com = Music Site (Score:2)
apple.com (Score:4, Funny)
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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 .. (Score:2)
But.. but I did have a website dedicated to my favorite MIDI files.. and it was cool
Th.. The Mommm- Mo moldy pp Peaches told me so.
news.com.com (Score:2)
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Badge of honor? (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
Testing a Content Filter with Sex.com (Score:3, Interesting)
Its one thing to test a proxy, another to explain to management your choice in samples.
art.com (Score:3, Informative)
Domain Gold Rush 2.0 (Score:3, Interesting)
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 neal@grosskopf.name.
Yahhoo.com (Score:3, Interesting)
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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