I need someone to hate for this. Was Flickr first?
The motivation wasn't to sound hip and cool, but rather to find a domain name that some squatting piece of trash wasn't asking eleventy million dollars for.
I've purchased 2 domains in the past 3 years: hackerstream and readwarp[1]. Perhaps you think they both have something wrong with them. But I contend that they're both better than del.icio.us or receivd. (Too bad that isn't all there is to a project.)
[1] In general I've been pleasantly surprised at how much of the namespace is still available. Both times I thought up a name in the shower after a few weeks of building it, and was pleasantly surprised to find my first attempt was available. Take it, done, and "find a domain name" was never even on my todo list.
What's with the even? Do you honestly think that is surprising?
[Citation needed] on three counts:
1. What does language "devolution" even mean?
2. Is English actually "devolving"?
3. Are domain naming trends in any way related to that?
As for point 2: yes, English is certainly devolving. I graded papers in college -- "u" and "lol" and "tho" being present in an academic paper is a worrying trend. The writing ability of the average college-aged person that I observed personally worried me about the future of prose, and educationally we're not doing anything about it (the guilty parties also don't care). Admittedly, my sample size is small, but I can't imagine this isn't the case elsewhere.
It isn't limited to English, either. My U.S. History class in high school did a hell of a job teaching me about the plight of Asian-American immigrants at Ellis Island in the 20th century (that was our first lesson), but completely skipped the 18th and 19th centuries. The new American education.
Languages have always changed, and grumpy old men have always complained about how those changes are destroying the language. But despite that perpetual cycle of corruption lasting for thousands of years, we are in fact not communicating by pointing and grunting.
- Grumpy Old Man
I'm 24.