Website Screenshot Of Every Two-letter Domain | Hacker News Reader

Website Screenshot Of Every Two-letter Domain

linkpeek.com

35 pointsfoxhop39 comments

Surprise, surprise. No one is doing anything useful with the majority of them, just like many other potentially useful domain names online.

I remember how pissed I was in 1998 when I tried to register my first website and found most names were squatted already. Truth be told, I'm still bitter at domain squatters.

Yeah, it's frustrating. There's a domain that I wanted, and the guy who's got it has been squatting on it for years and years. So I contacted him about it about 3 years ago and he said:

"Thank you for your interest. The web site is under extensive development and is not for sale. Only a (1) public company or (2) private company with sales in excess of $5B would be considered."

First of all, that website looks the same now as it did 10 years ago. So I'm not sure what "extensive development" means. And second of all, why would it be any of his concern whether my company is public or makes $5B in sales?

That really rubbed me the wrong way. I'd rather just get back a ridiculous number that I'm obviously not going to pay.

If it's a good domain, you're certainly not the only one who contacted him about the domain just out of curiosity. He's getting a lot of emails about it.

If he did what you suggest and replied to everyone with a ridiculous price -- "Hi, USD 20 million, ok?" -- then he'd just get a second wave of emails from people trying to haggle:

"That's outrageous! The domain is worth $100k maximum. I'll pay you $2k and give you 0.1% equity in my awesome startup. Deal?"

And if he doesn't reply to that, then the person will send another email with the worthless offer slightly tweaked, and so on... So he's better off setting a precondition that prevents the pointless replies, basically "I'll talk to you only if you have a legal department with more than 20 people."

It's honestly not that good of a domain though. I don't think it's worth $100k. Maybe $10k, although I'm not about to spend that much on a domain (but maybe someone will).

Anyway, good luck to him. I hope when he is ready to sell his domain there is someone looking to buy it for the kind of money he's expecting.

Why be bitter about something you missed because you weren't around back then? Manhattan was acquired by some Dutch guys for a handful of guilders back in 1626... That wasn't the end of real estate business.

Every era has its own opportunities. You should look around for stuff that's happening now, instead of looking back to what you might have done in 1993.

Real property isn't quite the same. With real property the owners have to pay taxes based on the land value which incentivizes owners to make use of the land.

With a short domain name, the owners waste the short name for the cheap price of domain registration ($20 max?).

That $20 is still a tax, albeit small.

The problem with the idea of charging parked domains is that defining what is "parked" is hard, and can easily be gamed.

I often have the opposite experience: there is a surprisingly large number of available good domains out there. With the proliferation of relaxed TLDs (.tv, .io, .ly etc, and now even more with the new arbitrary TLDs) domain squatting looks like a much less profitable activity than it was in the 90s.

I used to be a product/design guy at CNET in their games division. My team was working on one of the biggest initiatives for the company, launching a new site with a pretty small team of engineers (think it was 6, we had no editorial team, just some recent hires for data entry). In any case, we'd been working on it for 5 months or so, really grueling work, but we were young and excited about building something with so much potential. One month before the actual launch someone came up to me and said, "hey, we need you to move the launch date up two weeks". The reason was pretty boring, the usual executive needs it for X, and as you'd imagine nobody was very excited about it. So all the engineers are stuck in a cramp little meeting room bitching about how many extra hours we'd have to put in to get it done.

Eventually I laughed and said "Well, no one in this room will ever work on a two-letter domain again. That's probably reason enough. At least we get to say we launched one."

8 years later I still think about that day. I've had a pretty wild career, but yep, I doubt I'll ever get to build another TV.com.

Anyways, that's my tiny anecdote about a two letter domain! Worked with a lot of good people on it and still work with some of them. It's a pretty different site now, but right out of the gate it was huge and had tons and tons of community contributions to its episode guides, storing everything in a nice structured data style. These days all I think is... man, we could have done so much more with it (we should have put an API out for the data at least). From what I understand, Google's sidebar related data search results have slowly been biting at into the traffic of large wiki repositories like TV.com and IMDB over the past couple years.

I bet tvrage.com (started in june 2005) eventually stole a lot of traffic from tv.com, i have vague memories of a redesign by tv.com which broke old links, and was not very usable.

tvrage at least as I remember it was built from a crawl from tv.com data. But yeah, I left the product 6 months after launch and since then it's been in a dozen different hands and a bunch of redesigns, most moving the focus towards quick news and away from the wiki. Such is the way of the web.

Huh, apparently c4.com resolves to 127.0.0.1. Also they're running the screenshotting stuff on the same server that serves their site.

Also, running a query on localhost returns an nginx banner

That would depend on the server you have installed on localhost

no I mean if you run a query via their site for 'localhost' they take a snapshot of localhost, their own server.

As in: https://linkpeek.com/api/v1?uri=localhost&apikey=iq5czcxcj&t...

If the Admin is here, The very bottom ones (00.com, for example) should display upwards on hover, not downwards below the footer where it can't be seen.

This doesn't list all possible two-letter domains, just the .com's. There are others, such as uc.edu, ti.org, and 13.tv.

Yep, I thought I was going to find my own domain here.

I don't like how the popup after you hover on a link covers the links horizontally to the right. It forces you to move the mouse away, wait for the popup to dismiss, and then move the mouse over the next link. Maybe move the popups below the current row of links.

Like how lnkvu.com works?

Can view the image of one, then subsequent hovers don't load

Amazing how 80% is crap.

Isn't that true in general, 80% of tv is crap, 80% of photography, 80% of twitter/tumblr is crap, 80% of music is crap (country!), 80% of every human endeavor is crap.

Indeed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_Law

80% is probably on on the low side though...

Yeah, I was invoking Pareto. In other words, amazing how an apparently arbitrary sample ("domains with 2 letters"), as opposed to a random one, reflects the population's crappiness.

Not necessarily. 80% of anything might be crap for you but much higher than 80% of anything is not see as crap on the whole. You might hate country but tons of people love it.

Contrast with crappy domains: they are crap for everyone except may be the owner.

I think you're underestimating how crappy all of those things are with your 80% figure...

Incredible how many of these are not being utilized

There are some weird and strangely compelling sites on that list. I went on a very strange journey through some of those sites, and I found a chat room evidently operated by some secretive domain-squatting millionaire filled with a motley crew of famous shock site operators and random bored folks stumbling across two-letter domains.

The internet still manages to surprise me sometimes.

http://99.com ?

Yep.

I once looked at do.com a few years back. It was owned by Microsoft, and I thought they wont release that domain unless you pay them a hefty amount of money.

Someone apparently did. Unless...

Salesforce did.

http://www.thedomains.com/2012/03/15/salesforce-acquires-ano...

Much like when I go hunting for a good .com for a new project, it's mildly depressing to see how many of those two letter domains are rather going to waste.

follow up post- Firework Project Screenshot evert two-letter Domain: http://linkpeek.com/blog/firework-project-screenshot-every-t...

It's actually only two-letter (and digit) .com domains.

Any rules against punctuation in a 2-character domain?

A domain name component can't start or end with a dash, so it's effectively disallowed.

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