The fact that I find a service like this as cool as I do really speaks to how messed up the domain name service is.
Why is domain resale even allowed? "Ownership" of a domain seems silly to me. You should be licensing it from ICANN, and you should not be able to sell it. Part of the licensing agreement should be "if you are a domain squatting piece of scum, your contract will be terminated and you will not get your $6 (or whatever it is) registration fee back".
while i don't like squatters, I do believe by holding onto domains they are taking a big risk that there won't be a sudden shift away from the current DNS system in the future. i think the domain market is subject to black swans.
I wouldn't be shocked if in 10 years we rely on something else entirely to navigate to websites and .coms become virtually worthless.
i can see why a piece of physical property has lasting value and won't be subject to extreme changes, but i think the value of domains in the future has a very fat tailed distribution and there is a decent risk of them all plummeting to zero.
it is certainly a bubble. the question is how long it will last.
I agree, and that's an even bigger problem. I find it far easier to just google any site I haven't been to before, but that is relatively easy to poison, especially if the domain/site/service is particularly new.
And then the squatters will throw up a fake personal blog filling all available whitespace with ads, and since they are actually "legitimately" using it, nobody else can get the domain.
But those ads would be unlikely to cover the yearly registration fee. Without the possibility of making hundreds or thousands of dollars from a single domain sale, domain squatting becomes a lot less financially viable.
That's a pretty ignorant statement. Domain names can go a long way towards achieving great search rankings, which is why the better .net and .org domains sell for 10's of thousands of dollars. Though, I would agree that for those types of meaningless web 2.0 names you better get the .com, since all the marketing you do to build your brand will be pushing lot of direct traffic to someone else's domain.
http://godrops.com/ is a really good one I found a few weeks ago too (maybe even from here). You don't have to wait as with this one and you can do searches, etc. That said, I haven't found any worth buying yet but I'm surprised at how cool some of them are.
It's fun to see the good names it comes up with--except almost none of them are dot com names. I wonder whether a dot com name is really so essential anymore. Unless your marketing relies on print or word of mouth, your traffic will come from links, where the text of the domain name doesn't matter. Hmmm, I can't quite bring myself to believe it...
If you do register a name from this site, be sure to click the Learn More link on the Google domain registration page. It will give you the option of choosing the registrar.
DNS squatters are using very sophisticated algorithms feeding from Google Trends and hot words in blogs or mainstream media. Forget about getting a domain on something not obscure.
I don't have a problem finding jibber-jabber domains on my own.
This site took an annoyingly long time (~10 seconds per name, at a guess) to find three domains like "pladoo.org". I went to instant domain search and found borgyin.com, bergyan.com, yanbiry.com, whenberry.com, manywaffles.com, yellowwraps.com in a few seconds.
That is to say, if your site is about finding domain names - find good ones. I can string pronouncable syllables together myself easily enough.
This website is about assisting your creativity. It's throwing up randomness, strange names of any kind. It's fun to watch because it opens your mind to new possibilities when trying to name your service, or even have new ideas.
I spent about 3 hours on a domain name for my product, and came up with a good one (which I won't reveal here). For just the price of a domain registration. An automatic domain hunter (part of the domain lookup I was using) gave me some clues, but ultimately, I had to figure it out the hard way.
The fact that I find a service like this as cool as I do really speaks to how messed up the domain name service is.
Why is domain resale even allowed? "Ownership" of a domain seems silly to me. You should be licensing it from ICANN, and you should not be able to sell it. Part of the licensing agreement should be "if you are a domain squatting piece of scum, your contract will be terminated and you will not get your $6 (or whatever it is) registration fee back".