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Comment by mrduncan | Hacker News Reader

It looks like the .com (http://twitvid.com) belongs to someone else, does anyone else see this as a pretty big hurdle to adoption?

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It seems like it's not the end of the world. Dropbox doesn't have dropbox.com, and they're doing well. It's a constant annoyance, but it doesn't kill you. What kills you is making something users don't like. As long as you make something users like, you can survive domain name problems.

But its a constant annoyance which is going to stay for ever. Why not choose a different name? (Or buy the domain, before launching, its going to cost more, the more successful you become.)

One factor is that future money is worth less.

Yeah, I heard about this one guy who dropped out of Harvard to run a company even though he didn't own the companyname.com:

http://web.archive.org/web/20050318022700/http://facebook.co... when the company had just raised $13M).

1 - Dropbox.com is obviously not dropbox mistaken users will go to Google. 2 - Dropbox isn't really a site. It's more something you install on your machine. I use dropbox and I don't remember knowing that it isn't on dropbox.com 3 - It probably still costs dropbox something.

the problem is the name...even on techcrunch article they are branded as twitvid, not twitvid.io

On twitter the guys own twitter.com/twitvid

owning @twitvid will also be super valuable to get ahead

Actually, this raises a good point...they don't own @twitvid. What's to stop Twitter from taking it away and giving it to the Twitvid.com guys and reasoning that Twitvid.io should use @twitvideo?

(yes, I'm aware that people don't own domain names, either)

connections - this is the yc mafia

Shit, that seems pretty brainless. TwitCam, TwitSee, TwitSight, TwitEye, Twitwhateverthehellbutfortheloveofchristownyourdomainsdotcom.

Great way to funnel traffic to the wrong url, everything they do in marketing will send traffic to TwitVid.com, their competitor.

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