As HN: Startup name — dot com or not dot com?
As everyone knows, it is incredibly difficult to get a good .com name. Unbelievably difficult. The amount of names of new startups which all sound a little bit as dog names proves it. And the reason for this is obvious — everyone wants a short, pronounceable and a remarkable name... as a .com domain. However, what I cannot understand is why on earth are .com names so important? I mean, there should be a real reason why startups pick names like reddit, okcupid, gowalla, tumblr, quora, etc, instead of going with simpler and more prominent name in another domains? Since a few years there is a tendency of picking domains like .ly, .me, .io, etc. but I cannot think of a single successful project with a non dot com domain. I rather see another cases, like if a project gets popular it buys a better name (dropbox, facebook, delicious).
If the argument is that .com is kind of a "default" domain and everybody will type "name.com", then I would disagree, since no one is typing a url by hand. We use google, bookmarks, links, so the domain itself seems to be quite irrelevant. Maybe it is the appearance that matters? Or the ease of pronunciation? But the latter obviously suffers for names like flickr and tumblr.
What do you think? Why is e.g. roollr.com better than roller.at?