If anyone still wants a simple cool TLD .com, try out names with hyphens. They're almost completely unexplored and I personally see no downside (except typing the domain in a mobile keyboard but who types domains anyways).
It might be fine for a personal site etc, but be mindful that lots of people still don't understand that websites other than .com exist (i.e. don't get a .io domain if you want to sell to the general public).
I say "dash" and I honestly rarely have issues getting folks to our page. The worse part is getting people to understand the letters over the phone (half my customers don't understand what a phonetic alphabet is so I can't just use that every time... "How do you spell Sierra?").
My boss, on the other hand, seems to have the worst time telling people about the dash. He tends to fall back on our second domain (which just redirects to the main one), and even then still has issues (I think he just talks too fast).
Oh well, it was fun for a year.
Chatting with a friend that wants an app for his small business, just a 3 page app with a contact form: His clients are mainly 20s, mainly early 20s, not particularly technical. Most (so, around 60% of his client base) comment "Why no app." Most would have never have much recall of RSS.
He's 35, I'm around the same generation "Why do they need this? It's a front page and contact form, all communication then goes by email or Facebook." He said all about discovery and stickiness. Smart guy, certainly has a plan to increase stickiness with push notifications of articles/promoting his business. An interesting conversation.
No, I am not a computer.
Often people respond with Office reference: "Why use many word when few word do trick". Amusing. Novel reference. Haven't heard before.
For example, instead of starting a sentence with "Smart guy, ...", most people would write something like "He's a smart guy". Or instead of "An interesting conversation", people would write "We had many interesting conversations" or something along those lines.
I guess everyone is more suspicious since GPT-3 came out and a bunch of people made ML generated blog posts etc.
FWIW I found your comment understandable.
In the above post, "But spent the last decade... ESL speakers.", you dropped the "I".
In your original post, you wrote: "Chatting with a friend that wants... not particularly technical." You dropped the "I" and the "was", and it was a long sentence, so it was difficult to figure out who was chatting and with whom.
You also leave out the commas before quotations, making it difficult to figure out who's saying what.
Another example: "He said all about discovery and stickiness." I'm still not sure what this means. Did he literally say, "all about discovery and stickiness"? Or do you mean that he said "all" (i.e. a lot of stuff) about the topic of "discovery and stickiness"? Or did you drop the "it is", and mean that he said, "It's all about discovery and stickiness."
Is your second language one of those languages where the Subject is often implicit in the context? I find that in written English, dropping the Subject and Verb does not work so well. I find it interesting that this would affect your written communication so much.
Many of my friends and most of my coworkers speak/spoke English as a second language. When speaking to them, I would find myself using simpler words and simpler grammar (e.g. simple past tense instead of past perfect progressive tense). But when writing to them, most of them can read English perfectly well, and often know the rules of English grammar better than me, so I did not have to simplify my written communication.
Are you thinking that everyone only gets to sites from actual hyperlinks rather than via human speech?
I feel like everyone around me will Google whenever they hear about a cool app, website, store, product etc.
or we're charting online or talking on Zoom and they'll just send me the link directly
I'm not sure what the purpose of a URL is anymore... unless you're this guy [1]
As others emphasized, besides people not always using Google, it's a tragic short-term idea to defer your traffic to a search engine and all their power. You really should want people to go directly to you and not to any middle-man.
It’s called confirmation bias.
Once you start exploring outside your circle, it might not hold true.
Seems like about ~1% of the top 500 websites use a hyphen in domain.
Also brings to mind my first email address, which used an underscore! In my defense, it was a hotmail address created circa 1998, before there were strong norms for such things...
You mean the minus sign? Few know how to type the actual unicode hyphen with the keyboard. Not to be confused with dash, but short or long one?... and here start your problems.