I don’t understand .ly (and other cutesy TLDs)

It's pretty simple, medium and higher end tech users are becoming more and more used to the convention and to start building something, I'd rather spend $10-200 rather than 10K-200K on a domain name.

Along your point, I'm much more a fan of getmyapp.com rather than mya.pp. As for not understanding it, it's not hard to wrap your head around. Douchbags like the Domain King (just Google him) squat on thousands of domains, feeling like the Donald Trumps of the Internet and making it hard for everyone to find a decent name.

We have the trademark for Vively, a dictionary word meaning represented in a lively manner, especially on stage, which is great for a video hosting site. But the domain is being squatted. So, http://vive.ly it is.

You can see more about our startup at http://www.getvively.com/ ... And I bet you just love those get____.com domains too!

The answer is twofold: short .com domains are expensive, and nobody finds your service by typing in your domain.