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First register the .net name while you are thinking. It's only $7 or so.

.com is better than .net because .net is below the radar for most people. Have you thought of .org It doesnt mean nonprofit. It was set up for everyone else not in the military/industrial complex. Most people are aware of .org.

The going price for parked or low volume domains is around $15K Maybe an offer in that range will get his attention.

Someone in another thread made the point that most people will come to your site via search and your real name is not important. I dont really subscribe to that argument because people tell their friends without giving a proper link, say on the phone.

I thing you will regret the conflict if you go the .net route. Find another catchy name or add another word to the name you are already considering. TheCatchyName vs CatchyName. Remember catchy names are rarely as good as you think they are.

Final piece of advice. Do a trademark search for your name. (tm) is weak but (R) is very strong and you should avoid the conflict.

> Most people are aware of .org.

No, they aren't. I worked at a nonprofit that had a .org address that nobody remembered, not even the staff, many of whom ended up giving out name@foo.com addresses and even printed their business cards with the .com instead of their name@foo.org address. Ended up getting the .com and the .org so people would stop confusing them. You'd imagine if there was a TLD someone would remember with regards to an organization it would be .org, but it's really .com or whatever the prevalent ccTLD in the country is.

Speaking of telling friends and clients and other such people your email address/url over the phone, every single time I've told my super short email address (me@janey.me) to someone that wasn't geeky, it ALWAYS ended with "so is it me.com?" (well, I do have a mobileme account but no...), "so what is this at? hotmail? yahoo?"... I think that's why I still primarily rely on my gmail account that nobody has a problem with.

I think that this was unfairly down-voted - there's a ton of great information here.

>> "The going price for parked or low volume domains is around $15K Maybe an offer in that range will get his attention."

I wouldn't spend $15k on a domain unless that amount of money is small change to you. Also I think that's an insanely high figure in any event.

I based the 15k price of transactions that friends were involved in One had a good name he wasnt using, the other had plenty of cash. Other considerations show up: in calif. it is very difficult to find a good company name to register. Combine that with the difficuly of finding a domain name, $15K may not be so much.

In general I agree with you, $15K could be put to a lot better use.

Am I going to regret pushing forward with the .net address, or should I try to think of some different names that end in .com?

Yes. Since 1996 it has always seemed that all the good names were taken, and yet it has always been possible to find ones that weren't. All your name has to be is acceptable. Google.com is not a great name; the reason it seems good now is the associations we have with it.

Choose a different name. There are still tons available. Let the domain whores hold on to their "Premium four letter .com!!" names.

Just look harder and you'll find the gem.

(I spent about a day and found mibbit.(com|net|org) and I'm still pleased enough with the name).

Another concern I have about your great .net name: once you start using it the .com holder will increase the price greatly. Or he can sell it to another business. When .com is taken I prefer to move on in order not to get in awkward situation.

Think python.com (nsfw) vs. python.org. I went to .com for the fist time and I was at work - I had an unpleasant talk with my manager: she was standing next to me at that very moment!

EDIT: All went well but we decided to go with Ruby instead :)

How do you go about finding names? I've looked hard, and wasted a lot of time - I think that part of my brain must be missing or broken or something. I think mibbit is a great name btw.

I'd highly recommend GoDaddy's Domain Name Aftermarket (tdnam.com). I've gotten a ton of good .coms from there, one of which we recently sold for $35,000.

There are some good sources out there to try and find a domain name. http://www.domainpigeon.com/ is a good if you're looking for a random name.

To answer you're question, you should absolutely get a .com. In my experience, the .net name eventually becomes a pain in the butt for branding and user acquisition, especially with the .com having only a blank directory (a user will just think your site is dead).

It's also one of the first questions you'll get when pitching to investors. Why couldn't you get the .com? You're answer so far has been that you couldn't negotiate it. That sends the wrong message.

Cut your losses and just find a .com.

Regarding the guy holding the .com - Just because there's no website there doesn't mean it isn't being used. Think email.

Upvoted because that's the situation with me and my 4 letter domain name. I was able to buy it for ~$250 in 1999. Anyone know how much they go for these days?

The valuation might vary wildly depending on what particular 4 letters we're talking about and what order they're in.

I don't see how the order they're in could possibly matter.

pets.com

ptse.com

As far as I've seen, pretty much all "premium 4 letter domain names!!!" are held by people like you.

If no one has offered you a lot of money in the last 10 years, it's likely worthless IMHO

You might get really lucky and be able to sell it to another domain speculator, or someone that really really needs it.

What's the last big website to use a 4 letter .com name?

What's the last big website to use a 4 letter .com name?

There's digg and hulu at least. I can't think of anything more recent. (there's also xkcd.com but it's not exactly big)

eBay is the most obvious, but Hulu and digg are good calls too. There's also Vevo, Toys.com and Dice.com to name a few.

Short URLs are great, but given the 4 char domains left you're probably better off with a longer and more memorable one.

ning?

>> ...people like you

Hey, I take offense to being lumped in with domain squatters, because I have the domain name for purely personal reasons and I would never sell it. I was just curious about how much they go for, that's all.

(My first name is Idoh and I own idoh.com)

I would never sell it.

Even if it ended up being worth a fortune? I guess I would be hard pressed to sell my name domains too. But for enough money maybe.

Sure, I can envision some scenarios where I'd sell. I haven't gotten even one offer yet, so I don't think anyone will ever make an offer that is in the ballpark of what I'd consider.

heh sorry... In that case, it depends on how many people called Idoh you can find most probably who want to own the .com

At this point I only know of one other Idoh, and he's about 3 years old.

so your email is idoh@idoh.com?

Yup.

Short answer: yes, .net addresses will not be taken as seriously or remembered as easily.

Long answer:

But if tell us about your business and tell us your .net name, we can help you find alternatives.

If you don't the domain indexed by Google you can protect it with http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/ and share a link.

For example: http://mailhide.recaptcha.net/d?k=01s0ZBjDCRkIF5eU3zPiVtcQ==...

Register the domain before telling us. We are all very honorable, but the lurkers might not be.

I do own the domain currently, but I appreciate the words of warning.

You're right, I think this will be much easier with more information.

I'm working on a "for fun" gambling site - the domain I have is gambool.net; I suppose it's mostly good if you're a gambler (i.e. you know what gambool is).

I didn't know, so I had to look it up. In the spirit of helping, I toss out "WildGambool".

www.1truegamboolean.com is available

isn't it true that .net is "for fun" and .com is "for money" in the online gambling world...partypoker.net vs. partypoker.com etc etc

Yes and no.

That's just a way of getting around the advertising restrictions. You can advertise the hell out of pokerstars <tiny voice>.net</tiny voice> and be confident that your users will actually find you at pokerstars.com.

(It's just a corollary to the ".net is way less valuable than .com, especially when spoken about offline" rule. No play money poker site could afford mainstream TV advertising otherwise...)

I purchased watchdog.net, which I thought was a great name, but almost no one ever remembers it correctly.

Besides being a .net, this has the problem that "...dog dot..." is kinda hard to say.

As someone who has looked through of thousands of domain names I can tell you that there are still plenty of decent names left. The trick, as I'm sure you've figured out by now, is finding them. If you took the approach I originally took, you've probably spent a few hours on AjaxWhois trying to find something that works for you and your site.

To help alleviate the headache, I created http://www.domainpigeon.com, which lists around 45K available domain names (and more are added daily). Most are not very good. That's just the nature of the game, but if you're willing to look, you'll find that there are many good names still available.

More than 500 have already been registered, so it can't be that bad :)

http://www.domainpigeon.com/domains/registered

Hope it helps.

I'm one of the few "paying" customers of domainpigeon you've got, actually. I bought a premium membership (or whatever you were calling it) around when you launched, just for this purpose.

I check it out almost every day; it's a great site!

That just made my day, and it's been a good day.

(See http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10216713-2.html)

Thanks for being patient with all the changes!

I'm a big fan... spent ~2 hours looking through your lists over the last couple days. Nothing in particular stood out (like you said many of them are not very good), but it was invaluable in helping me think about my idea and naming in a different way. So thank you for that!

I keep wanting to setup a spoof clone site called http://www.domainwigeon.com

"Domain Wigeon. Not the web's #1 resource for available domain names"

Everything else people have said is good! One other note, if you look on the iphone keyboard while you're typing in a URL on safari, there's a ".com" key to finish off the URL. Just a thought. One day we'll have keyboards with a .com attached to it right next to the return/enter key.

Erm, we do it's called the Ctrl key. Ctrl-Enter adds ".com" and submits an entry in the address bar. Works in FF, Op, IE (IIRC) but not Konq, not sure about Saf.

Ctrl-Shift-Enter does ".org".

Or was that a "whoosh" moment?

that's neat!

I always end up typing slideshare.com instead of slideshare.net (the real one) even though I know it's .net

So, go for a .com

The problem is that if you're successful with the .net, the .com will magically become more expensive. Given that you think it's an awesome term, it may be a generic word for which you'd have no recourse to obtain.

That said, upcoming did OK with .org and SlideShare did ok with .net for a while. I'd recommend going with another .com, but the choice of TLD shouldn't make or break your company.

choose a different name and go .com. think and think again and you'll find a great name.

Never go for a .net or .info. When people remember, they remember only the name and put .com in the end.

A side question:

Do you need to get .net/.org/.[other TLDs] when you have the .com one?

e.g. google.net redirects to google.com, but google.org is for a different purpose.

This is why Hacker News is so awesome - due to the amazing input from everyone and a tremendously good suggestion from Blogimus, I've got a .com now that is pretty great (and I'm definitely excited about).

Thank you all so much!

Just remember, since you mention del.icio.us, that it redirects to delicious.com.

It didn't used to (they didn't originally own delicious.com iirc)

Exactly! They bought it when they became popular. My guess is a lot of people were typing delicious.com and they had to get it.

i'd get a .com first and foremost, can you do what facebook did and run as the[greatsitename].com?

The reason facebook was "thefacebook.com" is that the harvard yearbook is called "The Facebook"...

It wasn't a domain dispute. But it does bring up a good point that maybe you can just get some article to put in front of the name to get the .com.

i don't think facebook is a [greatsitename], it was a legacy name because Harvard and MIT had actual physical 'facebooks' for getting to know other students in your class.

well what I was pointing at, is that if you can't get the name you want add a "the" in front

It really doesn't matter.

I was pretty well camped in this school of thought as well, but I was going through use cases in my head and it kept nagging me that the iPhone has a ".com" button on the keyboard by default when you're entering a URL. So I made this post...

The advice has been strongly for a .com, and there have been a lot of really good reasons as to why. (In other words, my opinion has been successfully swayed.)

I think axod made a particularly good point with mibbit; 6 months ago I wouldn't have ever connected the words IRC or chat with the word "mibbit", but I do now; and I don't think I've ever forgotten the domain name.

I suppose any more people don't correlate the domain name with what it does as much as they used to.

Who cares about the name. Just make sure the product is good.

sometimes it's very relevant.

here's a great post on bad names. my favorite: Mole Station Nursery (or maybe Pen Island)

http://www.fazed.org/forum/view/?id=24396&last

Some are well-known, but I hadn't seen the Italian Power Generator company. I guess ambiguous interpretation is a kind of intellectual hack.

Ask HN: .net vs .com